A 28-year-old New Jersey man was sent to prison for up to 30 years for killing his 2-year-old son in a Bucks County crash after fleeing following his theft of $228 in electronic equipment from a Walmart, the county district attorney's office reports.

Christopher Kuhn, of Hamilton Township, New Jersey (Photo courtesy Bucks County District Attorney's office)

Christopher D. Kuhn, of Hamilton Township, was sentenced Monday to between eight and a half and 30 years after Judge Robert O. Baldi convicted him March 28 in a three-day non-jury trial on charges of third-degree murder and related offenses, the district attorney's office said.

On Oct. 3, Kuhn rolled a Jeep SUV in Tullytown in southern Bucks after driving through a red light and striking another vehicle, the district attorney's office said. Qadan Trievel, who wasn't secured in the vehicle, was thrown onto the street and died from a fractured skull, according to the prosecutor's office says in a news release.

Following the crash, Kuhn "paced briefly near his son's motionless body, then took off running when police approached," the release states He was arrested nearby.

Kuhn blamed his actions on drug addiction.

"The addiction I was suffering took control of me," he said in court, according to the release. "On a day-to-day basis, it was just consuming me, all day, all the time. I couldn't beat it."

Public defender Bradley H. Bastedo called Kuhn a "flawed, broken individual."

The judge made clear Kuhn was solely to blame for his son's death.

"Your choice was to go and commit a retail theft and take your child with you," Baldi said, calling the decision "selfish and self-absorbed. ... All of this happened because you did it. You caused it."

Kuhn expressed love for the child he killed.

"I don't know what to say, because nothing's going to bring him back. I'm just truly sorry," Kuhn said. "I loved my son. I don't want anybody to think that I didn't."

But the child's mother, Mackenzy Trievel, a woman Kuhn allegedly threatened with death in the past, expressed her pain in a letter to the court.

"Qadan was my world and there are no words to convey the amount of love I have for my son or the amount of suffering I am experiencing as a result of him being killed, literally ripped away from me in an instant at the hands of a careless person," she wrote, expressing her hope that Kuhn receive a long sentence.

"Because I believe he is likely to re-offend. He needs to be held accountable for his blatant disregard for others and stopped from hurting anyone else the way he has crushed me."

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