Laura Szendrei wouldn't have been attacked had her killer seen a therapist in the months prior to her murder.
That's what a forensic psychologist told the court this week.
The hearing into whether the North Delta high school student's murderer should be sentenced as an adult or a youth will continue next Wednesday in Surrey provincial court.
The young man, whose identity is shielded by the Youth Criminal Justice Act, pleaded guilty last year to second-degree murder, for killing the 15-year-old girl in 2010.
Szendrei was struck over the head at least three times with a metal pipe as she struggled to escape, along a path in North Delta's Mackie Park.
The North Delta man, who wasn't quite 18 when he killed Szendrei, is now 20.
If sentenced as an adult, his sentence will be life in prison without eligibility to apply for parole for seven years. If sentenced as a youth, he faces a seven-year sentence, with a maximum four of those years to be served in prison and the remainder in the community, under supervision.
Justice Robin Baird heard this past week that the young man had sexually attacked three women in Burns Bog between April and July 2010, with escalating severity, before killing Szendrei in September.
In the first Burns Bog attack, the court heard, the young man ran up to a woman and tried to grope her buttocks. In the second, he pulled down a jogger's shorts and in the third case the victim was hit with a stick.
Dr. Robert Ley, a forensic psychologist, told the court the Burns Bog attacks led the youth to believe "that he can assault a woman and get away with it."
This is what makes Szendrei's case particularly tragic, he noted. "Had he been caught," Ley said, he wouldn't have killed the teen.
The psychologist said that the young man seemed normal on the outside, but "still waters run deep."
Had he been seeing a therapist for his sexual problems and insecurities in the months before Szendrei was attacked, Ley told the court, the murder "most certainly would not have occurred."
