At a brief court hearing Thursday morning in Edmonton Court of Queen’s Bench, the case was delayed until late July 2021 to set a date for a defence application. It’s possible that the application won’t even be heard until October. 

Defence lawyer Marshall Hopkins has indicated he wants to file an application to reopen the defence case and present fresh evidence after the judge refused to find Stroh not criminally responsible. 

‘I have had enough’

The details of the case are outlined in the Justice John Gill’s written decision from 2020.

In 2017, Stroh, his wife Sasha and their five children were living on his father’s farm in Strathcona County. They occupied the main house, while his father, Norman Stroh, lived in a cabin about 90 metres away.

Kristian described his father as his best friend, noting that Norman was even the best man at his wedding.

His feelings toward his father changed in March 2017 when he suddenly stopped drinking, after he had been consuming between 10 to 30 beers a day

He began to think his father was spying on his family and he even locked the doors of his house to keep his father out. 

Kristian’s wife testified that her husband became depressed and suicidal. At one point she had him admitted to hospital for a couple of days. The doctor thought he was suffering from alcohol withdrawal. 

Psychiatrists later determined that without having alcohol as a shield, Kristian began to remember that he had been sexually abused by his father as a child. He told police he became focused on trying to protect his children from this father. 

On the day of the stabbing, he announced to his family, “I have had enough.” He grabbed his wife by the shoulder and told her to take their children away from the farm. Then he turned and walked to his father’s cabin. 

Norman Stroh was inside the cabin with his seven-year-old grandson. The two were laughing at a dining room table when Kristian raced in, yelled at his father, then began to punch him repeatedly in the head. 

Norman fell to the floor bleeding and asked, “What did I do?”.

The seven-year-old raced to tell his mother what was going on. When Sasha Stroh got inside, her father-in-law was on the floor bleeding in a fetal position. She tried to push her husband away and testified he yelled at her, “Everybody has secrets. Do you want to know my secret? My dad molested us as kids and he will do it to our kids.” 

Sasha called 911 and watched in horror when the stabbing began. The dispatcher told her to leave the scene to protect herself and the children. 

RCMP arrived and found Kristian on the road dressed only in his underwear, his hands covered in blood. 

Norman Stroh was stabbed 86 times. Most of the wounds were to his body, but his head was partially severed from his neck. 

Kristian Stroh told an RCMP officer he felt his father deserved what happened to him and that he only stopped stabbing when he knew his father “couldn’t hurt anyone.” 

When he testified in his own defence, Kristian said none of what happened that day makes any sense to him. He also denied he had been sexually abused by his father.

Depression and alcohol withdrawal

Kristian spent seven months at Alberta Hospital Edmonton and underwent two NCR assessments by three doctors who later testified for the Crown. They concluded that at the time of the offence, the accused was suffering from major depression and symptoms of alcohol withdrawal. 

The psychiatric experts also concluded Kristian had likely been sexually abused by his father as a child or teenager and the anger he felt as a result was a motivating factor. 

One psychiatrist testified that he believed Kristian’s desire to protect his son and the rest of his family was a main driver in the offence. 

The judge said that Kristian could’ve chosen to leave the cabin after he punched his father.  

Based on the opinions of the Crown experts, Justice Gill concluded that Kristian Stroh knew what he was doing when he murdered his father and that he knew at the time that his actions were morally wrong. 

“I find that [he] chose to act according to his personal moral conviction at the time of the offence, rather than according to society’s moral standards,” Gill wrote in convicting Stroh of second-degree murder. 

At a previous hearing, Stroh’s lawyer suggested he wants to call staff from the Edmonton Institution to testify about his client’s behaviour at the facility when he was off his medication.