Ashley Pereira’s family said they never gave up hope and never stopped looking for him.
Ashley Pereira’s family said they never gave up hope and never stopped looking for him.
“For 17 years, we hoped, we prayed, we waited for our Ashley to come back to us, to knock on the door, to walk in, to say he is home,” his parents, Muriel and Dennis Pereira, wrote in a victim impact statement at the sentencing of Chad Reu-Waters, their son’s killer.
“He did not get that lucky,” they wrote. “You murdered him and left him in the freezer. You duct-taped his mouth, you covered his face. You did not allow him to call for us, speak for us, give him a chance to live his life.
“You took him away in cold blood.”
The statement, read by family friend Errol Francis, began the hearing Friday to determine how long Reu-Waters’ parole ineligibility will be as he serves a mandatory life sentence for second-degree murder.
Reu-Waters, of Jarvis, was tried for first-degree murder, but a St. Thomas jury returned a second-degree murder verdict.
He was charged after Pereira’s body was found in a chest freezer that had been dumped over a bluff east of Port Burwell on May 6, 2019. He and Pereira had met when they were both inmates at a Milton jail and had entered a business arrangement with $100,000 in computers.
Periera vanished in March 2002. Over the years that followed, Reu-Waters would tell people he killed him in a Guelph storage unit and stuffed the body in the freezer; he then used the information to threaten his intimate partners.
That freezer was moved several times, but spent years in the basement of a Simcoe hobby shop operated by Reu-Waters’ son, Sam Waters. The son and two friends disposed of the freezer after visiting with his dad in jail.
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Assistant Crown attorney Andrew Paul argued for a parole ineligibility term of 18 years. Defense lawyer Andy Rady called for a term of 12 to 13 years.
The hearing was conducted by teleconference because Rady reported earlier this week that he was recovering from COVID-19.
Reu-Waters spoke from the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre, London’s provincial jail, and apologized to the Pereira family saying “it’s something I did that I totally regret.”
But he also said he was haunted by the murder and he talked about it when he was drunk because “I was having trouble dealing with it myself.”
“That’s why I had kept the freezer for so many years, because I didn’t want to further hurt Ashley, that’s how I felt,” he said.
“I spent the last 20 years not knowing what to do and what not to do. Again, I’m sorry, I feel remorse daily and I’ve lost sleep daily for years,” he said.
Superior Court Justice Kirk Munroe will award Reu-Waters on Nov. 1.