Mother confronts man who murdered her son

REGION A grieving mother confronted the killer who murdered her son and wiped tears from her eyes in a hushed Kitchener courtroom.

“I believed that monsters were make-believe,” Hayley Schultz told the man. “But now I know this is not true.”

The shaggy-haired killer wore a blue suit and sat silently in the prisoner’s docket Wednesday. He was 17 when he shot and killed Bradley Pogue in a botched drug rip-off at a Cambridge plaza. He’s 20 today.

Prosecutors have asked Justice David Broad to extend his incarceration by sentencing him as adult, rather than as a young offender. Because he was younger than 18 when he committed murder, his identity is shielded by law.

Schultz, who lives in Peterborough, addressed the killer directly, telling him about the impact of her son’s murder.

She no longer goes to work. She struggles to sleep. She forgets when she last ate. She has been medicated with antidepressants. Her family has been fractured and her relations with her other children have suffered.

“I feel like I am suffocating when I try to breathe,” she said. “I don’t feel like leaving my house any more because I feel the world is unsafe, cruel, and violent because of you.”

She was stunned to discover she shares a birthday with her son’s killer. She no longer celebrates it, unable to separate her happiness from her pain.

The killer, convicted last December of murder in the second degree, will argue as the hearing continues that he deserves to be sentenced as a youth.

If sentenced as a youth, he faces at most four years behind bars on a sentence of up to seven years. If sentenced as an adult, he faces a life sentence that could see him paroled from prison after seven years.

Pogue, 24, had a two-year-old daughter. He went to the Brierdale plaza with his older brother, Codi Pogue, to sell $1,700 of weed to his killer. It was just after 8 p.m. on Nov. 19, 2018.

The teen pulled a handgun on Bradley and said: “What’s worth more? A pound of weed or your life?”

When Bradley tried to knock the gun out of the teen’s hand, the killer shot him twice, including once in the head. He died in front of his older brother, who was not hurt.

Hayley Schultz cradled a teddy bear in court. It contains ashes of her son and this comforts her.

Pogue’s daughter is almost six today. She does not remember her father. It will be up to Schultz to tell her who he was and what he was like.

“This will be a lifelong journey for her,” Schultz told the court. “Each time I look at her I see Bradley and it brings me some comfort knowing she has part of him within her.”

The sentencing hearing continues until Friday and is expected to resume in September.

“He did an adult crime. He does the adult time,” Schultz said outside court. “He took a life.”