MONTREAL—It was a slap that had been reverberating for nearly four years.

A 74-year-old man who unintentionally killed his 13-year-old daughter when he slapped her over a dispute about chores has been sentenced to 60 days in prison — far less than the two-years-less-a-day sentence sought by the Crown.

Judge Richard Marleau said he considered the obvious remorse of Moussa Sidimé, who pled guilty to manslaughter charges last year, as well as his lack of a criminal record in calculating the sentence in the October 2010 death of Nouténé Sidimé.

“For a Muslim, you believe that what has happened is the will of God . . . . Whatever would have come out today would have been what God wanted — as with the passing of our sister, said Aissatou Sidimé-Blanton, who travelled from Texas to be at Wednesday’s sentencing.

“We love her dearly, we didn’t want her to go, but it was what God wanted at that time. This is one of those freak accidents that, as he has said, if he could take it back, he would take it back.”

Nouténé was cleaning the floors in the family’s apartment in Longueuil, south of Montreal, when she was reprimanded by her father for missing dirt under a carpet in the kitchen.

At a February sentencing hearing, Sidimé said that he had returned to the living room when he heard Nouténé speak back to him. He told the court he struck her on the face twice and once again on her backside. Five minutes later he heard a noise and found his daughter unconscious on the floor.

Sidimé called 9-1-1 and tried to resuscitate her, but the girl died in hospital several days after the Oct. 6, 2010 incident. An initial charge of aggravated assault was then upgraded to manslaughter.

An autopsy later concluded that the force of the blows likely caused her neck to twist in such a way that she ruptured an artery, cutting off the flow of blood and oxygen to the brain.

Nouténé was remembered by friends as a popular girl and gifted artist who hoped one day to become a lawyer. But the Sidimé clan also came to the defence of the father of seven children, saying that he was a normally upstanding figure and an important presence in the family.

Crown prosecutor Julie Laborde told reporters after the sentencing that the judge felt there had been a strong enough message sent by the charges against the retired architect, who will be able to serve his term consecutively meaning that he can check in and out on weekends.

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One of the man’s older daughters, Odilla, testified at her father’s sentencing hearing that Sidimé had become “a changed man” after the death.

“He was always, to me, very confident. He always had a presence about him. That has now dimmed somewhat,” she told the court, according to a February report in Montreal’s The Gazette.

“There is a hole in my family. There is a hole in my heart. I know that my father would never wish that on his family or on his wife.”

An online petition asking for leniency in the case described him as pillar of his Guinea-Canadian community who studied at Université Laval in Quebec City and worked with a Canadian architecture firm before taking a job in the Ivory Coast with the African Development Bank.

After retiring, he returned his family to Canada, in order to provide a better life, education and opportunities for his three youngest children.

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