MANDEL: How many more women have to be killed on their way out the door?

Article content Miranda Craig Doff is working on her PhD on gender-based violence — but even she had no idea her younger sister Brittany was herself a victim of intimate partner violence. She would only learn that horrible reality on Jan. 3, 2022 after her sister’s “on-again, off-again” partner, Kadeem Nedrick, stabbed her to death in front of their four-year-old autistic son.

“ He snatched her life not because he couldn’t bear a world where they weren’t together, but because he couldn’t tolerate a world where she wasn’t his ,” she said bitterly. “ No woman deserved this fate, but to understand the sheer brutality of his actions, you would have needed to know the exceptional person he extinguished.” Wiping away tears was a courtroom filled with relatives and friends, many wearing purple in honour of the fight against domestic violence, as Nedrick sat beside his lawyer, stoically staring straight ahead.



Earlier this month, on the eve of his trial, he pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. According to the agreed statement, Brittany Doff, 30, was living with Nedrick and their son at 195 Grace St. in Little Italy but after eight tumultuous years together, she wanted him to move out.

“She was afraid for her safety.” She had good reason to be. A year earlier, they were living apart and Nedrick had come over to visit their son.

During an argument, he knocked Doff off her chair and when she told him she’d call police, he threatened to throw her off the balcony. Recommended video Nedrick admitted to then grabbing her by the neck with both hands and when she began to scream, he put his hands over her mouth and told her to shut up. Doff called police and told them this wasn’t the first time he’d physically abused her.

Nedrick was charged with assault, choking, threatening death and released on bail the next day. He was then diverted to the Partner Assault Response program, where after completing 12 sessions, his charges would be withdrawn. What a farce: He tried to strangle her yet he’s sent for counselling? It obviously wasn’t changing his ways — he still had three sessions left when he murdered Doff by stabbing her twice in the chest.

“He was able to commit this crime against my sister because our criminal justice system failed to intervene in a tangible way, making this type of violence inevitable, ” Craig Doff told Superior Court Justice Michael Brown. “It took guts, sheer bravery for her to call out for help to our police. We, her family, did not know, but YOU knew.

Our police, our criminal justice system, and the Children’s Aid Society knew about the crime Mr. Nedrick committed, and the seriousness of his actions were minimized both to her as the victim and to himself as the perpetrator when he was mandated to sessions of anger management,” she argued. “H ow many more women, just like my sister, have to be brave enough to prioritize their own safety only to be killed on their way out the door?” In the days before she was killed, Doff told her mom and two friends she was afraid but Nedrick refused to leave.

She confided in one friend that he’d come home New Year’s Eve and threatened to kill her while pacing around with a hammer. “You are lucky that you are still alive,” he told her. “I think about killing her every day,” Nedrick had told longtime friend Leon Hollness earlier that night.

“Women are vermin and they need nothing but discipline and abuse.” Doff fled their home early in the hours of Jan. 3, 2022 when Nedrick was “freaking her out.

” Later that night, she returned with a girlfriend to pack some belongings. Doff went down to the basement bedroom while her friend waited in the kitchen. It wasn’t the first time that upstairs neighbour David Atkinson and his wife heard raised voices coming from their unit.

“This time they ended in a scream that cut straight through two floors that both of us will carry with us forever.” He rushed down to take care of the little boy while police took away his father. It was only later that he learned the non-verbal child had been found standing over his mom’s blood-soaked body, moaning and crying.

As Doff’s stepsister Ciera Chin demanded, “How could a father do that to his own son?” The sentencing hearing continues. [email protected].