Article content Warning: this story contains details some readers may find disturbing. David Michael Moss, the man who brutally murdered seven-year-old Bella Rose Desrosiers as her mother tucked her into bed, will have to serve 15 years of his life sentence before he can apply for parole. People wept quietly in an Edmonton courtroom Friday as Court of King’s Bench Justice Steven Mandziuk sentenced Moss, recounting a crime he called “horrific, gruesome and prolonged.
” “This was a shocking, horrific and sickening crime,” the judge said. Moss, 38, sat silently in the prisoner’s box wearing orange and black correctional coveralls. He spent the hearing with his hands folded, head bowed.
Mandziuk convicted Moss in April 2023 of second-degree murder, rejecting the one-time tattoo artist’s claim that a brain injury suffered at age 18 caused the psychosis he experienced when he attacked Bella Rose with a pair of scissors. Moss asked to be found not criminally responsible, which would have seen him confined to a mental hospital rather than prison. Mandziuk, however, found it more likely Moss’s psychosis was drug induced.
He noted Moss ramped up his marijuana use at the beginning of the pandemic but abruptly quit five days before the May 18, 2020, killing. The judge concluded it was “more likely than not” that this psychosis was caused not by a brain injury, “but rather by cannabis-related causes — use, intoxication, withdrawal.” Moss — who grew up in a famil.
