Jacob Forman said he'd killed them because he didn't want them to grow up and know he murdered their mother.
A Canadian man who killed his wife and then two daughters was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 35 years for the triple murder.
Jacob Forman, 35, hit his wife, Clara, in the head with a sledgehammer three times after an argument about his drinking habits on Dec. 17, 2017. As he swung, she shouted, “What are you doing?” according to prosecutors.
When the couple's daughters, ages 7 and 9, heard their mother's screams and came to check on her, Forman told them she was sick.
Forman then took his daughters to church before returning home and strangling them both with a children’s horse's head on a stick toy, prosecutors said. The father said he'd killed them because he didn't want them to grow up and know he murdered their mother.
“He said [to police], he thought it would be better for them to go home to heaven than to grow up in a world where daddy had killed mommy,” prosecutor Murray Kaay said in court.
The dad went to work after the murders for two days before police found their bodies in the garage of their home. He told authorities he contemplated suicide after the slayings.
Forman pleaded guilty to two charges of first-degree murder and one charge in the second-degree for the murder of his wife.
He has to serve at least 25 years for the murders of his daughters and another 10 years for his wife’s murder before he's eligible for parole.
His wife’s sister spoke in court before he was sentenced, saying her family still cared about him.
“We don’t look at Jacob as only a perpetrator,” she said. “We look at Jacob as a person going through this with us, with an enormous amount of pain that we can’t even understand.”
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