Luka Magnotta's Childhood & Early Life In Canada Was 'Isolated' & Problematic
The convicted killer recently asked to be transferred from a maximum-security prison.
In 2014, Luka Magnotta was found guilty of first-degree murder, after killing international university student Jun Lin.
The Canadian was the focus of the Netflix documentary Don't F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer in 2019, but the show didn’t speak too much about Magnotta’s early life in Canada.
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Who is Luka Magnotta?
In 2014, Magnotta was found guilty of murdering 33-year-old student Jun Lin in Montreal in 2012.
Several years later, Lin’s murder, and a number of Magnotta’s animal abuse crimes, became the focus of a 2019 Netflix documentary called Don't F**k With Cats: Hunting an Internet Killer.
Where was he born?
He was born in July 1982, in Scarborough, Ontario, according to a timeline of his life shared by CBC News.
Between 1998 and 2000, he reportedly attended I.E. Weldon Secondary School in Lindsay, which is in the Kawartha Lakes region of Southeastern Ontario.
By 2012, he was believed to be living in an apartment in Montreal.
Luka Magnotta's early life
During Magnotta’s trial back in 2014, his father appeared on the stand and spoke about his son’s early life in Canada.
According to Global News, his father explained how Magnotta had been named Eric Clinton Kirk Newman at birth, after Clint Eastwood and Kirk Douglas.
“There was a lot of trouble. There [were] a lot of problems with Eric,” he said.
He said that both himself and Magnotta’s mother had struggled with issues related to alcohol and described an “intense and isolated family life.”
“He did not [have friends]; he was isolated. No schooling, no friends of any kind,” his father said.
Where is Luka Magnotta now?
In 2014, a jury found Magnotta guilty of five charges, including the first-degree murder of Jun Lin.
He was sentenced to life in prison for murder and received the maximum sentence for all other charges against him.
This included charges related to indignity to a human body, publishing obscene material, criminally harassing Prime Minister Stephen Harper and mailing obscene and indecent material.
He is currently serving a life sentence at a facility in Quebec, where he married another inmate in 2017.
His mother, Anna Tourkin, called for his release in 2020 due to a COVID-19 outbreak at the prison. These requests were denied.
In January 2022, he accelerated his fight to transfer out of a maximum-security prison by taking the federal government to court.
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