Derrick Lawlor sentenced to life in prison

It’s life behind bars with no chance of parole for 25 years for Derrick Lawlor.

The 56-year-old Waterloo man was sentenced this morning at the Regional Courthouse, after being convicted Tuesday for the first-degree murder of Mark McCreadie of Kitchener.

Lawlor appeared to be wiping away tears, after the sentence was handed down by Justice Gerry Taylor, who called McCreadie’s death “brutal” and “senseless.”

In a victim impact statement read by the Crown, McCreadie’s daughter Tammy said, while she once loved nature, she can’t walk through trails without thinking about how her father was strangled in a wooded area on the edge of Victoria Park three years ago.

She wrote she lies awake at night thinking about his final moments, and suffers from severe panic attacks when something as simple as a tree reminds her of her father’s murder.

Crown Attorney Linda Elliott says they were confident the jury would make the right decision.

“As His Honour mentioned, this was a senseless death,” Elliott says. “All of our witnesses were incredibly professional, well composed. We couldn’t have asked anything more of them. And we were professionals and we did what we had to do.”

Tammy described her father as someone with a “big heart,” who didn’t deserve to die.

Lawlor will get credit for time served, stretching back to the day he was arrested in April of 2014.

“Any life is important, of course it’s incredibly sad the circumstances of this death,” says Elliot. “We give it our all in any case we do.”