Warning: This story contains graphic details

Family members of Nikosis Jace Cantre are still in shock about what they heard during a five-day adult sentencing hearing for the teen girl who killed the six-week-old baby boy.

Nikosis's mom, Alyssa Bird, found her son in his play pen badly beaten — bruised, bloody, swollen, scratched and gasping for air — in July 2016. He died of blunt force trauma to the head after the teen choked, punched, kicked and stabbed Nikosis with a metal nail.

“I cry every day when I wake up, cry every night when I go to bed. It’s just really hard knowing that we lost him in such a tragic way,” the infant’s grandfather Jeffery Longman said outside Saskatoon Provincial Court Friday.

When the teen addressed court, she apologized to the family and community.

“I’m truly sorry for what I’ve done and it’s very devastating for me,” she said. “I just hope I don’t go through this ever again. I’m trying really hard and if this would have happened to my baby I’d be really devastated too.”

The teen, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justce Act, has pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and a judge is set to decide if she’ll receive an adult sentence.

Moral-blameworthiness — how accountable one should be for their actions — is at the heart of the sentencing decision.

Crown prosecutor Jennifer Claxton-Vickzo argued for an adult life sentence because the teen is a threat to public safety and needs lifelong care and services, which isn't available with a youth sentence.

“A youth sentence wouldn’t adequately address all of the needs, including the protection of the public,” she said.

She said the teen is mature enough to be sentenced as an adult and argued the crime had a level of sophistication, including when the teen attempted to hide blankets covered in blood. She also argued that how the teen rocked the baby before beating him shows the teen is mature enough to properly know how to handle a baby.

“This was a brutal attack on a helpless infant,” she said.

Court heard of the teen's previous violent tendencies: assaults at youth centres, lighting a group home on fire, giving morphine to an eight-year-old cousin and the disturbing ways she hurt and mutilated animals. Claxton-Vickzo said a federal psychiatric centre is the best fit for the teen.

Defence lawyer Brian Pfefferle argued, legally, the teen should receive a youth sentence. While she was 16 at the time, he argues she was younger in “almost every other way.”

“This young lady’s severe cognitive disabilities, her (fetal alcohol spectrum disorder) diagnosis and various other factors, she has a lower degree of moral blameworthiness than the average offender, the average youth even.”

The teen has no parental guidance, was adopted days after she was born and lived in a transient home with alcoholism and abuse, Pfefferle said.

The teen escaped while serving an open-custody sentence at Kilburn Hall in July 2016 and roamed the streets in Saskatoon looking for a place to say. She told a woman she escaped from a group home in Prince Albert. The stranger gave her food, clothing and tried to take her to EGADZ, a youth centre, but it was closed, according to an agreed statement of facts.

The woman eventually took the teen to a home in the 200 block of Waterloo Crescent, where Nikosis and his family lived. The teen had never met anyone in the home prior but they agreed to let her stay there.

Pfefferle said there’s no motive for the crime. The teen told a police officer after her arrest she was angry and took her anger out on the baby.

“I was sick and tired of life,” she said. “That’s why I hurt that baby and I killed it.”

The family said the hope of justice for Nikosis gives them strength and they would like to see an adult sentence.

“He doesn’t have a voice to speak for justice on his behalf. Couldn’t even talk, couldn’t crawl,” Longman said.

The maximum youth sentence for second-degree murder is four years in custody, followed by three years supervised in the community. An adult sentence for second-degree murder for someone who was 16 or 17 at the time of the crime includes life in prison with no chance of parole for seven years.

The judge is scheduled to hand down his decision on Feb. 27.

Angelina Irinici was in court, covering the hearing: