A Nanaimo man who pushed his girlfriend off a cliff to her death was sentenced this week to four years in prison.
Kyle Gordon Ordway pleaded guilty in August to manslaughter in the death of 27-year-old Amy Watts, whose body was found by police in a wooded ravine below a cliff near Nanaimo City Hall on June 3, 2021, nearly a month after she was last seen.
Ordway told people he and Watts had been arguing on May 8 and he pushed her, not realizing there was no railing in the area, and she fell off a cliff, court heard in August.
Watts died of extensive head injuries as a result of blunt force head trauma consistent with a fall from a significant height.
B.C. Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Power accepted a joint sentencing submission from defence and Crown counsels of four years. With credit for time served in pre-sentence custody, Ordway will spend two years in a federal institution.
Watts’s mother, Janice Coady, said she had hoped for a longer sentence.
“Amy was my only child. She was my everything, so to have her gone and for him to be living on and getting away with it, basically. I mean, what do you do? There’s nothing that I can do,” she said. “I could be angry but it’s not going to change anything, so I just have to accept it.”
Coady, who attended Ordway’s sentencing virtually from her home in Prince Edward Island, said the three years since her daughter’s death have been difficult, but she is trying to move forward.
“Time doesn’t lessen the hurt or the loss that I feel,” she said.
Watts was working as a mental-health outreach worker and had been planning to move back to PEI before her death, Coady said.
In a victim-impact statement she read in court in August, Coady said the future without her daughter “will always leave me broken.”
Ordway, who was born and raised in the Comox Valley, has struggled with drug addiction since he was a teenager, defence lawyer Bobby Movassaghi told the court in August.
He went into foster care at a young age because his father died by suicide and his mother struggled with addiction, Movassaghi said.
Ordway and Watts had a complicated relationship “mired with drug addiction, homelessness and violence,” Crown prosecutor Basil McCormick previously told the court.
Ordway addressed Coady and Watts’s father in the courtroom in August, apologizing for their daughter’s death.
“I’m truly sorry this horrific freak accident happened that should have never happened and I’m truly sorry for Amy being gone this early in life,” he said.
