Man sentenced again to life in prison for Barrie woman’s murder, Report

The man convicted of murdering Mimi Khonsari in Barrie 10 years ago has been sentenced.

And the Khonsari family was in the Toronto courtroom where it happened this morning, there to hear the outcome of a long and difficult legal proceeding.

Today marked the second time Claire Spiers has been sentenced for Khonari’s murder, but unlike the first time there will be no appeal. So, for the Khonsari family a decade-long search for justice has come to an end.

On May 21, 2004, Massoumeh Khonsari, 60, was found dead in a wooded area of Oro-Medonte, near Barrie. She’d been strangled and stabbed several times in the neck. Her baby granddaughter, whom she’d been babysitting, had been abandoned in a car in the lot of a high-rise building in Barrie.

“The woman who taught me and my brothers about grace, kindness and generosity, and who deeply loved and showed my father the greatest tenderness and compassion was taken from us in a violent and heinous act,” Khonsari’s son Navid Khonsari said during his victim impact statement.

“We will never recover our sense of comfort and trust in society, as our world was shattered in one dark and unpredictable act.”

Spiers already had a criminal record for 24 violent offences, including rape, car-jacking and robbery, and the Crown argued he couldn’t be rehabilitated.

“[Khonsari] was murdered twice — strangled and then, on the threshold of death, stabbed,” the Crown said.

“[It’s] rage and brutality and overkill of a woman [Spiers] didn’t know, who was babysitting her granddaughter that day … The public needs to be protected from him.”

The Crown wanted no parole for 17 years from the day Spiers began his sentence, and that’s what Judge Ian Nordheimer decided.

Khonsari’s husband, Dr. Homa Khonsari was chief of surgery at the Royal Victoria Regional Health Centre and died of cancer in 2011, according to a report in the Barrie Examiner.

Agencies/Canadajournal