MANDEL: Woman describes pain of losing fiance in bar stabbing weeks before wedding

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Three weeks before his wedding day, Paul Spilchen lay dying in the parking lot of Scarborough’s Working Dog Saloon, trying to stave off the blood pouring from a stab wound to his lower chest.

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His fiancee Annie Forte received the terrible news as she was celebrating her bachelorette two hours away with her girlfriends.

“At the funeral, seeing our groomsmen carry Paul to his final resting place was devastating,” Forte recalled in court. “I put the wedding band on his finger that we picked out together the week before, I left a note in his pocket and when that casket closed, so did an entire chapter of my life.”

At the sentencing hearing of his killer almost four years later, Forte, Spilchen’s mother, and other relatives tried to explain the loss and agony that has haunted them since Michael MacKinnon inexplicably plunged his work pocket knife into a kind and gentle soul in the early morning hours of June 16, 2018.

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MacKinnon, a 42-year-old landscape truck driver, had been at the same bar that night when a verbal altercation broke out after closing time with Spilchen and his friend, Richard Deliva in the parking lot. Within minutes, Spilchen had collapsed from a fatal stab wound that sliced his inferior vena cava and Deliva would lose a third of his blood volume but ultimately survive after surgery.

The killer fled the scene and was arrested Father’s Day on charges of second-degree murder and attempted murder.

At his trial by judge alone, MacKinnon testified that he heard one of the men threaten he was “going to get shot” and it took him back to the paralyzing fear he felt when he was shot in the chest at close range when he was 17. He claimed it left him in a robotic state of “mental disorder automatism” and he didn’t even remember stabbing the unarmed men.

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In a judgment last fall, Ontario Superior Court Justice Jill Copeland said she believed MacKinnon suffers from PTSD from being shot as well as from abuse and neglect as a child, but she rejected his defence of being not criminally responsible due to automatism.

Copeland acquitted him on the murder charges and convicted him of manslaughter in the death of Spilchen and aggravated assault in the wounding of Deliva, finding that he had no intent to kill.

The tragic result for Spilchen’s loved ones, though, is just the same.

“All my hopes and dreams I’ve been planning since I was little was taken from me overnight,” his fiancee said in her victim impact statement. “I became a widow at 27 years old and moreover, my heart breaks for Paul who didn’t get a chance to be a father. He would have been the most amazing father.”

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She had been working towards her CPA, but had to quit her studies and her job, no longer able to focus.

“Nothing makes sense anymore. I’ve lost all sense of direction. I’m completely numb, a shell of a human being,” she said. “Truthfully, I haven’t wanted to be alive since the day I lost Paul.”

In sentencing submissions, the Crown asked Copeland to sentence MacKinnon to a term of 12 to 14 years while the defence said a sentence of five to seven-and-a-half years is appropriate.

“He wasn’t out there looking for trouble on that night, he was a lamb on that night until the final moment,” said lawyer Dirk Dirstine.

It was an “utterly spontaneous” act by an otherwise law-abiding citizen who was given “remarkably bad cards” as a child and has suffered mental health issues as a result, he said.

In a brief statement, a remorseful MacKinnon apologized to the victims’ families, as well as to his own, especially his grandchildren.

“I’m really and truly deeply sorry for what happened that evening.”

The judge reserved her decision to April 13.

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