Judge sentences teen who killed another teen in a fight to more than the maximum

In a move rarely seen in a Snohomish County court, a judge sentenced a Marysville teen who killed another teen in a fight to more than the maximum penalty for the crime.

The judge said the kick to the head that killed 16-year-old Robbie Myrick Jr. and the actions that followed last August were so cruel that the boy responsible deserves a harsher punishment.

Myrick -- and the teen we are not naming because he is a minor -- had agreed to the fight in these Marysville woods.  The teen admitted to punching Robbie so hard he fell and then kicking him so hard he suffered irreversible brain damage.  No one called 911 for at least an hour, including four adults watching the fight.

“I pray to God Robbie was not cognizant of being left on the ground like some discarded piece of trash,” Robbie’s uncle Rod Hampton told the Snohomish County judge Friday.

At the teen’s sentencing, a shattered family pleaded for the judge to give more than the 30-day maximum sentence for second-degree manslaughter committed by a minor.

“The defendant in this case claims he didn’t intend to end someone’s life. I’d be willing to bet that your average drunk driver who ends up killing someone in an accident didn’t get behind the wheel with the intention of killing someone, but if they did they would be charged with vehicular homicide, and they wouldn’t be looking at a token sentence of 30 days,” Robbie’s father, Robert Myrick Sr., told the judge.

And the judge agreed -- 30 days is not enough.

“He was down on the ground, he could do nothing to you — you had won the fight, to put it that way — and for some reason I will never know, you decided to up the ante on your victim and that resulted in his death,” Judge Richard Okrent said to the teen, sitting next to his attorney.

The teen was sentenced to one year in juvenile detention.

Robert says it should be much more, but at least it’s a little more.

“It makes me feel a little better — the judge seeing differently than the prosecutors,” Robert told us after the sentencing.

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