Petrit Lekaj gets life for murder of daughter Sabrina

An Adelaide father who killed his 20-year-old daughter by stabbing her eight times in a fit of rage will spend at least 20 years behind bars.

Petrit Lekaj, 49, left, has been sentenced to at least 20 years jail for the murder of his daughter, Sabrina, right.

Adelaide woman Sabrina Lekaj was a bright and beautiful 20-year-old university student who when not studying diligently towards her radiology degree enjoyed socialising with her friends.

Her domineering Albanian-born father, Petrit Kelaj, believed his daughter was partying too much. He noticed she was no longer complying with her curfew, had lost weight, and was often inexplicably draining her bank account of her allowance.

His suspicions were confirmed when Sabrina went out with friends on Saturday July 20 last year and did not come home until 1.30pm the following day. Shortly after she returned the police arrived, following up on several reports that her white Mercedes had been seen driving erratically. The car was parked in the driveway of the family’s western suburbs home, with minor damage to the front bumper and passenger side.

That Sunday night, Petrit Kelaj exploded.

He demanded his daughter take an ambulance to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital where she was subjected to a blood test under suspicion of being intoxicated or on drugs. When Petrit Kelaj and his wife picked their daughter up from the hospital 90 minutes later, she broke down on the ride home, and confessed to having taken cocaine.

Back at home, Sabrina told her parents she was hungry and wanted to head out for some takeaway. Her father said that he would drive, but before leaving the house, he grabbed a knife from the kitchen.

Petrit would later tell police that he had not intended to use the knife to kill his daughter, merely to “scare” her, saying he feared she was “throwing everything away”.

But kill her he did. In a sickening and brutal attack, Petrit Kelaj stabbed his own daughter eight times in the chest and abdomen, then held his hand over her mouth until she was sitting, dead, in the passenger seat of the white Mercedes.

“At the time of the attack you did not see Sabrina as your daughter but rather saw her as an evil person with whom you did not have a connection,” Justice Trish Kelly told Petrit Lekaj in the Adelaide Supreme Court yesterday.

“You told police that when you began the attack, your intention was to hurt Sabrina, but that when you moved to sit in the rear passenger seat and stabbed her multiple times, you realised she would not be able to survive and your intention at that point was to kill her.”

Justice Kelly noted that Lekaj had pleaded guilty immediately to the crime which would normally entitle him to a 40 per cent discount on his sentence, which would have given him what the judge called a “wholly inappropriate” non-parole period of 14 years.

Instead, the judge imposed a non-parole period of 20 years.

Justice Kelly noted the “tragic irony” that Lekaj himself had a history of drug crime, serving a four-year prison term for heroin dealing in the 1990s and two subsequent cannabis convictions.

Romina Lekaj the mother of Sabrina and wife of Petrit Lekaj leaves the Supreme Court in Adelaide on Tuesday.

And while acknowledging Lekaj had been out of work for six months prior to the offence and was suffering depression, the Judge said his psychiatrist’s report stated his mental disorder played no part in his actions.

“The bond between a parent and a child is ordinarily fundamental,” Justice Kelly said. “The crime of filicide involves such a catastrophic breach of that bond that it is difficult for anyone to fathom how you could have done it.”

In her sentencing remarks, Justice Kelly told Lekaj that it was clear that he had become “incensed” by both his daughter’s insolence and her dismissive response to his distress and anger at her behaviour. But she placed no exculpatory weight on his reaction.

“In those few moments you simultaneously destroyed your life as well as Sabrina’s. You also changed, forever, the lives of each member of your family - your wife and your young son. You will have to live with those consequences for the rest of your life.”