2 years for fatal stabbing

Warning: This story contains details of domestic violence and may be triggering to some readers.

A Kelowna woman was sentenced to two years in prison and three years of probation for fatally stabbing the father of her two children.

“Me and Matthew (Cholette) were living in our addiction….I never thought I’d break free, but Dec. 13, 2020 changed me forever,” Marlena Isnardy told the court Friday, her voice broken with emotion.

She killed Cholette that night — a crime she told the court that she still grieves and regrets.

It’s also the night she stopped drinking and for that she told a courtroom full of friends, supporters and her former partner's family, she’s grateful. Nightly she prays for Cholette and the family he left behind, including their two children.

“I find this very tragic,” Crown counsel David Grabavac said, while offering the court details of the crime and the events that led to it.

He described the relationship between Isnardy and Cholette as toxic and abusive. By Dec. 13, 2020 it had deteriorated to the point that Cholette was court ordered to not be living with Isnardy, though he did anyway.

Grabavac said both Cholette and Isnardy had been drinking. Text messages between the two showed Isnardy had gone out and that was the cause of some frustration.

That fight had real world consequences when she returned home.

Grabavac told the court that the gas station across the street from the couple’s Black Mountain home caught footage of Isnardy in a window.

She can be seen holding a child, Grabavac said, then being punched in the head, and putting the child down.

According to a later interview, Isnardy told police that Cholette later pulled her hair and threw her down the stairs.

It’s at the bottom of those stairs that she fatally wounded him, as he tried to put on his boots.

When police interviewed neighbours Grabavac told the court that one heard banging, then Chollete saying, “put down the knife.”

“Then he observed the deceased, stumble outside, through the back door, fall to the ground, and then say, ‘I’m dying’,” Grabavac told the court.

Another neighbour also saw Cholette’s final moments and heard those fateful words.

Paramedics arrived shortly thereafter and found Cholette’s lifeless and bloodied body outside, on the ground. In his pocket was Isnardy’s floral purse, with $2,287 enclosed.

Grabavac said Isnardy was crouched over him, crying.

Police reported she appeared intoxicated and had blood on her hands and socks.

The Betty Crocker kitchen knife she used was found in the house.

A subsequent autopsy indicated that Cholette died from a single 55-centimetre stab wound that pierced his lung and his heart.

Isnardy was arrested in February 2022 and, at that time, charged with second-degree murder. She pleaded guilty earlier this year to manslaughter.

Crown and defence provided a joint sentencing submission of two years in prison and three years of probation, which the judge accepted.

Judges in Canada are bound to respect joint submissions, unless they believe the proposed sentence brings the “administration of justice into disrepute” and would lead a typical person to believe there is a “breakdown in the proper function of the justice system.”