Seattle man who killed disabled roommate gets 18 years in prison

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:

Sobbing as he addressed the judge Dec. 5, Brian Sheridan Walsh praised the man he killed.

"The world lost a kind and special person that day, because of my actions," Walsh told King County Superior Court Judge Michael Fox. "I don't ask (his family) to forgive me. I don't think that could even be possible."

Walsh's victim -- Harold "Benny" Reside, 44 -- was a fragile, wheelchair-bound man, who died a brutal death April 15, 2007, at Walsh's hands.

Walsh, 46, was initially charged with first-degree murder and second-degree assault.

He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder, a plea prosecutors agreed to in part because Walsh's drunken state would have made some elements of the stiffer charge difficult to prove. Walsh had no serious run-ins with the law before he killed Reside. His attorneys asked for leniency because of his mental illness and alcoholism, requesting a 14-year sentence.

None was in the offing; Fox sentenced Walsh to the maximum sentence allowed, 18 years in prison.

According to prosecutors, Walsh beat Reside with a brass lamp and stabbed him in the face, head and neck with shards from the lamp's ceramic cover before strangling him with the lamp's cord. Police arrested Walsh hours later near Reside's West Seattle apartment, finding him in a drunken stupor talking to a dog.

"Mr. Reside was a small, weak man," Fox said, delivering the sentence. "The evidence indicates an entirely unprovoked assault on a helpless victim."

Any forgiveness Walsh may have hoped for from Reside's family was also absent in the courtroom.

Reside's sister, Pam Reside Leach, said she still couldn't understand how a man her brother had taken in could attack him so savagely.

"My brother had an incredibly hard life," Reside Leach said. "I will never forgive you Brian, remember that. You were given so much more in life than Bennie."

Speaking after Fox's ruling, Reside Leach said she had one last task to complete for her brother, whom she'd helped care for during his trying life. She'll be placing a plaque on her brother's grave at a North Bend cemetery, where he was laid to rest next to his father.