Kenneth Law’s sentencing hearing is scheduled to begin in an Ontario courtroom on Wednesday, four months after he pleaded guilty to aiding in the suicides of 14 people in Canada and admitted to playing a role in dozens more deaths abroad.
Mr. Law, 61, operated an online business selling a toxic salt and other deadly paraphernalia to vulnerable people. A court heard earlier this year that he told clients he had engineered painless suicide methods.
Authorities said he shipped about 1,200 parcels globally to vulnerable young people he met in online suicide forums. The former engineer admitted he manufactured kits, which he sold for as little as $80 apiece between 2021 and 2023, earning around $300,000.
Mr. Law was arrested in 2023 and charged with 14 counts of aiding suicide and first-degree murder. This spring, he pleaded guilty to the aiding suicide counts as the Crown stayed the murder charges. His victims in Ontario included two 16-year-olds, and court also heard that he admitted a role in the deaths of another 79 people in Britain.
The hearing is scheduled to run for several days as the families of victims from Canada and Britain provide victim-impact statements. Here are some of their stories.
The Mitchell family, Toronto
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Ethan Mitchell, holding a portrait of brother Stephen, was at the court in Newmarket this spring with father Stephen Mitchell Sr., right.Christopher Drost/The Canadian Press
Stephen Mitchell Jr. died about a month before Mr. Law was arrested. He was 21.
He suffered from depression and had stopped taking his medication. He paid US$87.17 via PayPal for a package of poison from Mr. Law and was found dead by his brother on March 25, 2023.
His father, Stephen Mitchell Sr., said his son’s death was preventable, and he plans to make that point when he gives his victim-impact statement. “I do intend on calling for a formal inquiry,” he said in an interview with The Globe and Mail.
He said it is unconscionable that Mr. Law was able to sell poison for years before authorities moved to stop him. And he said his son might still be alive today if police had acted earlier, given he was among the last of the known Canadian victims.
“What I do know is that this day should have happened much, much sooner,” Stephen Sr. told reporters as Mr. Law pleaded guilty in May. “Perhaps dozens of young lives of the vulnerable, like my son, might still be alive today.”
The Prosser family, Thunder Bay
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Kim Prosser, top, lost her son Ashtyn Prosser-Blake in 2023.Sammy Kogan, Dax Melmer/The Globe and Mail
Kim Prosser has struggled to write the statement she plans to read in court. “It still impacts me greatly – the sadness and the grief that all of this has brought up is intense,” she said in an interview. “It doesn’t just go away.”
Her son, Ashtyn Prosser-Blake, was a 19-year-old honour roll student who also killed himself about a month before Mr. Law’s arrest. He had paid US$80.84 for toxic salts and was found dead in Thunder Bay.
According to the agreed facts in the case, he was found in his grandparents’ home. When his grandmother went to check that the doors to the home were locked for the night, she found a journal at the top of the stairs that read, “Goodbye.” She went downstairs and found her grandson.
Ms. Prosser said she hopes to use her statement to remember her son, and also to sound a note of healing and forgiveness.
She said that Mr. Law’s admissions this spring spared her and other families from sitting through a wrenching trial.
“He’s coming from hurt and trauma, too,” she said.
The Bedoya-Lopez family, Aurora, Ont.
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Since Jeshennia Bedoya-Lopez, top, bought toxic salts from Mr. Law, Leonardo Bedoya and his wife have tried to make ends meet.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
Maria Lopez plans to tell the court via a translator about the immense loss of her lone child, a teenager who was also her best friend and confidante.
She knows victims cannot recommend sentences, but she said she still believes Mr. Law deserves life in prison for murder.
“It isn’t right to mess with people’s minds when they could actually be helped,” Ms. Lopez said in an interview last week.
Her 18-year-old daughter, Jeshennia Bedoya-Lopez, was found dead in their family home in Aurora on Sept. 10, 2022, after paying Mr. Law US$81.48 for a lethal packet of his toxic salt.
The past four years have been incredibly difficult for Ms. Lopez and her husband, who are refugees from Colombia awaiting a decision on their immigration status. The couple have worked nights as cleaners in different cities to make ends meet while trying to make sense of their loss.
“All that’s left for us is to look back on memories and cry,” Ms. Lopez said. She added that if her daughter were alive today, she would be living out her dream of becoming a police officer and owning a small dog.
The Nunn family, West Sussex, England
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Imogen (Immy) Nunn, in top photo and bottom left, was 25 when she took the poison Mr. Law provided her. Louise Nunn, at bottom right with her daughter, wrote a statement for the Canadian court hearing Mr. Law’s case.Courtesy of family
Speaking from England, Louise Nunn said she struggled to write a succinct statement for the Canadian court summarizing everything her 25-year-old daughter meant to her.
One problem was that she knew that Mr. Law would be listening. “I didn’t write a great deal,” she said in an interview. “I didn’t want him to know too much, to get off from the pain and the devastation.”
Imogen (Immy) Nunn was found dead in her home on New Year’s Day, 2023. She had paid Mr. Law US$82.47 for a packet of poison. A year earlier, she had been released after five years in a mental hospital, where she was treated for emotionally unstable personality disorder and severe depression.
The Nunn family is devastated that the British government did not do more to stop Mr. Law before his arrest or bring him to justice.
“I just think the government needs to just sit back and actually listen. Maybe they should be in their courtroom hearing about all our loved ones that we have lost,” Ms. Nunn said. “The heartbreak, the pain that you know we’ve gone through and we’re still going through.
“It’s like we’ve just been left.”
Ms. Nunn said people need to recognize the policy implications of the case, given how a Canadian online business escaped police scrutiny for years despite cultivating a global notoriety for selling suicide substances.
“People are getting cleverer and cleverer on the internet,” she said. “It’s not going to stop, is it? It’s just going to get worse.”
The Parfett family, London area, England
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‘Please learn from us and keep your loved ones safe online,’ Tom Parfett’s father, David Parfett, stressed to the Canadian court in his written statement.Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
David Parfett, who lost his son Tom, said he has already been brought to tears reading the victim-impact statements from other British families.
He is providing the Canadian court a written one himself. “The loss of Tom impacts his family every day. The thought that we could have done better and stopped him taking his own life is a burden we have to carry,” he told The Globe this week.
“Please learn from us and keep your loved ones safe online.”
Tom Parfett, 22, had paid Mr. Law US$87.09 for his toxic salt on Oct. 11, 2021. Staff at a British hotel found him dead in his room two weeks later.
In the years that followed, his father emerged as the person perhaps most responsible for ensuring that Mr. Law was brought to justice. He worked closely with journalist James Beal of The Times of London to expose Mr. Law’s activities.
That news investigation into Mr. Law was published in the spring of 2023 and immediately prompted Canadian and British criminal investigations. Before he was arrested by the Peel Regional Police, Mr. Law denied any criminal wrongdoing in an interview with The Globe, stating that he started the businesses after going bankrupt during the first wave of the pandemic.
Mr. Parfett is not travelling to Canada for the hearings. But he sees the sentencing hearings as the “end of the beginning of the campaigning work to stop online harms and end deaths from suicide.”
There is much work still to be done, he said. Earlier this year, the British government resisted calls for a public inquiry by families of people who died using Mr. Law’s products. Ontario Premier Doug Ford has said he also will not convene an inquiry.