CityNews Rewind: The Unthinkable Murder Of Robbie McLennan

April 19, 2002 is a date Kathy Bradley will never forget. That’s the day the mother of 16-year-old Robbie McLennan realized her son would never be coming home.

Robbie was a big guy for his age, but he was gentle. He loved to fish, play video games and listen to music. He was a promising boy with a promising future.

But it was all wiped out that terrible April night in a crime that still has the city of Orangeville in shock.

It started when four teens, including the victim, gathered in a remote field in the town outside of Toronto after a night of drinking.

It was that same alcoholic intake that had apparently led Robbie to laugh at one of the participants, Bronson Penasse, when he vomited earlier that day after a bar hopping binge.

Incensed, the 20-year-old vowed revenge.

It came in that dark and lonely field. A 16-year-old boy and another girl of the same age both helped Penasse beat, punch and kick the cherubic-faced McLennan, in a torturous attack that lasted three excruciating hours.

Robbie was also burned with cigarettes, pelted by large rocks, stomped on and sodomized using a stick. When his body was found the next morning, he was virtually unrecognizable.

A coroner later ruled blunt force trauma was the cause of his death, although the pathologist was never able to completely say which of the dozens of blows was the fatal one.

He also noted it took Robbie a long time to succumb to his injuries and he suffered for hours before his death.

The crime outraged the community and the trio was arrested the same day.

Bradley doggedly stayed in the courtroom during the absolute worst of the graphic and terrible testimony, refusing to leave until justice was done for her son.

And she saw at least some of it come to pass.

Penasse was sentenced to life in prison for first-degree murder in October 2005. He won’t get a chance at parole for 25 years and has been permanently placed on the Ontario Sex Offender Registry.

The 16-year-old girl, who can now be identified as Terry Baker because she pled guilty to first-degree murder as an adult, also received a life sentence with no parole for a decade.

She admitted kicking the boy in the groin so hard that it shattered one testicle. Her shoe print also left an indelible mark on his forehead, silencing him as he pled for his life. Baker learned her fate in January 2006.

And the 16-year-old male who helped hold Robbie down while he was brutally attacked admitted his guilt in a second-degree murder plea in December 2004.

He confessed he stood on the victim’s hands to prevent him from defending himself, while blow after blow rained down on the defenceless youngster.

By April of the following year, he, too, heard his sentence. Because he was a young offender at the time of the crime, he wound up with only 18 months plus time served – and five years probation.

It was this boy, the only one who’d known Robbie from school, that admitted to the sexual assault.

And it was this same teen who was released on  Friday, horrifying the victim’s family and re-opening old wounds that will never really heal.

While embittered, Robbie’s relatives have tried to turn their tragedy into a triumph by establishing a yearly fishing derby to help raise funds for a scholarship in their beloved son’s name.

They also have a website that pays tribute to their lost boy. You can see it here.