A Mom's Story in Surrey North Delta Leader
Written by admin Monday, 14 September 2009 18:00
Sandra Martins-Toner would drive by the house of the woman charged with ordering the killing of her 16-year-old son Matthew, hoping tocatch Katherine Quinn violating her bail conditions.
Quinn was living with her parents less than 10 blocks from Martins-Toner’s Vancouver home.
“I honestly don’t know what I would have done had I come face-to-face with her.” Sandra Martins-Toner writes in The Last Six Minutes, an account of her son’s murder and the arrest and trial of accused killers Quinn and Quinn’s boyfriend Robert Allan Forslund.
The grieving mother would find out.
It happened during a break in the trial at the New Westminster courthouse when Martins-Toner opened the door to a women’s washroom and ran into Quinn.
“My body began to shake; it took everything in me to physically control myself,” Martins-Toner writes.
“I stared into her cold, evil eyes and yelled, ‘You child killer!’”
Since it came out in August, The Last Six Minutes has sold 10,000 copies and a second printing is planned.
“I’m extremely thrilled about the reception the book has had,” Martins-Toner says. “It’s been incredible.”
She will be signing copies in Surrey on Sunday, Sept. 20, at 1 p.m. at the Chapters Strawberry Hills bookstore at 12101 72 Ave.
The date is Matthew’s birthday. He would have been 21.
The title refers to the length of the SkyTrain security video that recorded her son’s final moments.
Martins-Toner says she has never watched the video and never will.
Matthew Martins was walking by a late-night Whalley house party on July 2, 2005 when there was a confrontation with Quinn, one of the partygoers. In the scuffle, Quinn suffered what doctors called a minor cut under her left armpit.
Martins fled, with Quinn’s boyfriend Forslund in pursuit. Forslund caught up with Martins at Surrey Central station. One witness to the brutal attack testified that Quinn urged Forslund on, saying “if you love me, you’ll kill him.” Both Forslund and Quinn were found guilty of second-degree murder by a B.C. Supreme Court jury in April 2007.
Quinn’s conviction was overturned and a new trial ordered after the appeal court found the judge at the first trial mis-instructed the jury on the issue of whether Quinn encouraged or assisted in the murder. Quinn is now free on bail. Her re-trial is set for April 6, 2010.
Martins-Toner is planning to take a leave of absence from Families Against Crime and Trauma (FACT), the group she founded to lobby for victims’ rights, to attend the proceedings.
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