Jason Dahr stared straight ahead and showed no emotion as the jury foreperson pronounced him guilty of murdering his father.
His cancer-striken sister Tammy, 28, sitting a few rows behind her troubled brother, was moved to tears.
"I'm relieved," she said after the second-degree murder verdict was read last night about seven hours after Superior Court Justice Dougald McDermid finished his jury charge.
"I felt my dad's presence in the room and when the verdict was read, I felt he finally had a voice in all this."
Wayne Dahr, 54, was found stabbed to death in his daughter's Gammage Street apartment in April 2008.
He had come to London a few weeks earlier from Dartmouth, N.S., to care for Tammy and to counsel his 34-year-old crack addicted and homeless son Jason.
Just hours after Wayne Dahr had left this daughter's hospital bedside, he was stabbed more than 50 times, mostly to the head and neck, slicing his larnyx and cutting his carotid artery and leaving him in a bloodbath on his daughter's bed.
Jason Dahr, admitted stabbing his father, but said it was in self- defence. The Crown said Dahr intended to kill his father.
The two men had grappled over a knife Jason Dahr had pulled on his father after he said he was "pissed off" by his dad's suggestions to get over his failed marriage and move on.
After his father was dead, he took $10 out of his dad's pocket for gas to fill up Wayne Dahr's rented auto. He took his sister's computer monitor and DVD player and pawned them.
The jury heard about Jason Dahr's rapid downward spiral fuelled by drugs starting in the fall of 2007. He had lost his job, lost his wife, lost his apartment and was living part time in a shelter and in a hole under an apartment stairwell.
The automatic sentence for second-degree murder is life, with no parole for between 10 and 25 years. The jury members were asked to give a parole ineligibility recommendations. Three opted to give no recommendation, five suggested 10 years, one suggested 16 years, one suggested 17 years and two suggested 20 years.
Jason Dahr sneaked a couple glances at his sister from the prisoner's box and when he was being led out of the courtroom on a recess, said to her, "send me some (inaudible) pictures."
Dahr is to be sentenced on Jan. 5, when it is expected Tammy Dahr will provide a victim impact statement.
Her parents separated when she was young and she hadn't had a close relationship with her father until the few months before his death when he became a rock of support in her cancer fight.
"I miss him a lot," she said. "I just hope that our family can now start the healing process."
jane.sims@sunmedia.ca
