Seven years didn’t seem like much for Jeremy (Beau) Taylor’s life. But, his family said, the sentence dealt to Adam Keith, 30, was better than their worst fears.

“We’re satisfied with the result but obviously, no, it’s not enough time,” said Taylor’s cousin Steve Boyle, who spoke on behalf of Taylor’s large family.

There had been concern the man who plunged a knife into Taylor’s chest three years ago might walk out of the London courthouse after his sentencing Wednesday.

Keith, Taylor’s roommate and longtime friend, has been behind bars since May 24, 2014, the day he killed Taylor, 28, and turned himself in to police.

With a mandatory enhanced credit, that time is equivalent to four years and two months, leaving two years and 10 months left to serve.

Keith’s defence team had made a pitch for a four- to six-year sentence and Taylor’s family braced for the possibility of time served.

So with Superior Court Justice Marc Garson’s sentence, there was a quiet sense of relief among Taylor’s loved ones, but also sadness and frustration.

“He gets to get out in two years and 10 months. We’ll never see Beau again,” Boyle said.

Keith pleaded guilty in January to the lesser charge of manslaughter on the day his second-degree murder was set to begin.

The Crown had agreed to the plea after psychiatric assessments agreed alcohol and possible provocation weighed into Keith’s decision to stab his best friend.

Keith and Taylor, who had known each other since high school, had gotten into a fight outside their Clarence Street apartment during a long weekend party. Both had been drinking, and Taylor, the bigger of the two men, had the advantage during the fight.

Garson had been told the fight broke up and Keith spoke to a couple of revellers, walked into the apartment, grabbed a kitchen knife, came back outside and buried the knife in Taylor.

While he was leaving, Keith told a witness Taylor was “bleeding to death.” Keith phoned police a short time later and admitted he had stabbed someone.

Garson said that stab wound and the photo of Taylor’s chest X-ray drove home how savagely he died. The blade of the kitchen knife had broken off and was embedded in his chest wall.

The image weaved through Garson’s sentencing decision to send Keith to prison for seven years, and helped convince him there was much more intent behind what happened.

Garson called the photo “chilling” and later “ghastly and unnerving.” He pointed to “the considerable force” that would have been used to plunge the knife into Taylor’s chest.

Keith’s defence had asked Garson to consider it “an impulsive act with little in the way of thought or planning.”

Garson disagreed. “These were not sudden or impulsive actions,” he said, calling it “an utterly senseless and brutal attack.”

Manslaughter sentencings widely vary, but case law points to placing the homicide on a scale between an accident and a murder. The judge said Taylor’s death was closer to a murder.

He had to balance Keith’s lack of criminal record, his troubled past, his alcohol addiction and mental health issues, his guilty plea and his remorse “against the sheer brutality and ferocity of the attack.”

And, Garson said, the act had robbed Taylor’s family of a son, brother, uncle, cousin and friend.

“Sir, your heartless actions on that fateful day have forever changed so many lives. You have robbed the deceased a chance at life,” Garson said to Keith, who quietly stood in the prisoner’s box.

Garson urged Keith to seek help in prison for his alcohol and mental health issues and said he hoped he would “emerge from custody a new and different person.”

Boyle said the family will try to rebuild, but moving on from losing someone so special may not be a possibility.

“I don’t know if we ever, ever will move on,” Boyle said. “You can live on, but I don’t think we’ll move on. They say time heals all wounds. Three years hasn’t healed anything yet.”

jsims@postmedia.com

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