Popular Canadian actor, Ryan Grantham, has been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to murdering his mother, Barbara Waite, in 2020.
The 24-year-old, who played Jeffery Augustine in teen drama Riverdale, was sentenced at British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver, Canada on Wednesday, September 23.
Grantham pled guilty to the second-degree murder charge and will be eligible to apply for parole after 14 years, BBC reports.
According to prosecutors, on March 31, 2020, Grantham shot his mother, Barbara Waite, in the back of the head as she played piano in their Squamish townhouse. He planned the killing in advance and rehearsed his actions beforehand, considering the murder for about 15 minutes.
Grantham also filmed a four-minute video on a GoPro camera in which he confessed to the crime saying: “I shot her in the back of the head. In the moments after, she would have known it was me.”
After drinking beer and smoking marijuana for hours following the murder, he packed a car with three guns, ammunition and 12 Molotov cocktails he had made, as well as camping supplies and directions to Mr Trudeau’s Rideau Cottage residence.
He drove roughly 200 kilometres east to the town of Hope, before turning around and driving to a Vancouver police station, where he told an officer: “I killed my mother.”
The court also heard Grantham had considered committing an act of mass violence at Vancouver’s Lions Gate Bridge or at Simon Fraser University, where he had been a student, en route before turning his car around and handing himself in.
