WOWT
February 12, 2015
A man sentenced today to serve the rest of his life behind bars didn’t show up in court. The family of his victim was there in force.
Robert Grant declined to leave his jail cell for his 1st Degree Murder sentencing for killing 43-year-old Trudy McKee. McKee’s family sat in Judge Gregory Schatz’s courtroom as the judge sentenced Grant to life in prison and fifty years for use of a weapon to commit a felony. Judge Schatz gave Grant the maximum sentence on both charges.
The prosecution called the murder “savage and barbaric.” Judge Schatz agreed calling Grant “a very dangerous person” who exhibited extreme violence in the murder of McKee and in subsequent court proceedings when he attacked his own attorney and punched a Douglas County Deputy.
Douglas County Attorney Don Kleine called the sentence “appropriate.”
“Life plus fifty years, I mean, true justice would be able to bring the victim back in this case but we can’t do that so we want to make sure that he can never get out and never hurt anybody else again,” he said.
Judge Schatz said Grant gave him no choice in the sentencing based on Grant’s interview with a probation officer which revealed Grant expressed “no remorse,” refuses to “accept responsibility” for his actions and “denies culpability” for killing McKee.
“You’d like to think that somebody that does something like this will at least at some point in time have a conscience and show some sort of remorse for what he’s done to somebody. But he doesn’t so that’s just the way it is,” Kleine said.