EDMONTON \u2014 A distraught aunt of a teen killed on an Edmonton transit platform yelled profanities at a judge Wednesday, as he dismissed the family’s request to review a decision not to lay charges in the death.<\/p>\n
“There was never a chance in this court!” Chasity Phillips shouted at Court of King’s Bench Justice Wayne Renke. “You are corrupt.”<\/p>\n
The family of 13-year-old Eric Omeasoo requested a judicial review of the police decision not to charge a man in the stabbing of the teen at the MacEwan light rail platform in February of last year.<\/p>\n
The family was also denied a judicial review of the decision by Crown prosecutors.<\/p>\n
Court heard that Michael Lucier stabbed Eric in the chest after an altercation with a group of youth. While several of them were charged with attacking Lucier and his wife, police didn’t pursue charges against the man, saying evidence pointed to him acting in self-defence.<\/p>\n
Renke dismissed the request for a judicial review, saying the boy’s family didn’t provide evidence of abuse of process in the case.<\/p>\n
He said the family would have to prove police used unreasonable discretion in deciding not to pursue charges against Lucier.<\/p>\n
The judge said evidence investigators had, including video surveillance from the transit station that partially showed what happened, was enough to support that police exercised reasonable discretion.<\/p>\n
For his decision to dismiss the request for a review against the Crown, Renke said prosecutors only provided an opinion to police that chances of a conviction were low based on the evidence at the time.<\/p>\n
“It is a general rule in Alberta that police, not the Crown, decide to lay charges,” the judge said. “The Crown cannot direct the police not to lay any charge.”<\/p>\n
Renke said there was no evidence that prosecutors acted with “flagrant impropriety” or engaged in conduct “bordering on corruption” in providing their recommendation to police.<\/p>\n
The boy’s family said outside court that they would continue to fight for justice.<\/p>\n
“(The decision) sends a message that it’s OK to kill our children, it’s OK for the police and the Crown to do whatever they want,” Phillips said.<\/p>\n
“I realized today that no matter what we provided to the court, there was never a chance at justice for Eric in this courtroom.”<\/p>\n
She said she wasn’t sure what more legally her family could do, but “we will not rest until the world knows Eric’s truth.”<\/p>\n
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 25, 2026.<\/p>\n
Daniela Germano, The Canadian Press<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"EDMONTON \u2014 A distraught aunt of a teen killed on an Edmonton transit platform yelled profanities at a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":499955,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194294],"tags":[49,48,199971,23752,199970,199968,852,199966,199969,199967],"class_list":["post-499954","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-edmonton","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-crown-prosecutors","tag-edmonton","tag-edmonton-transit","tag-eric-omeasoo","tag-family","tag-judicial-review","tag-michael-lucier","tag-wayne-renke"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499954","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=499954"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/499954\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/499955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=499954"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=499954"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=499954"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}