ALFRED — In the audio recording, the 11-year-old boy’s voice was choked with tears and panic.
Justice Wayne Douglas sentenced Kandee Weyland Collind to 32 years in prison on Monday for murdering her ex-husband, Scott Weyland. She pleaded guilty to that charge in 2018 but filed a motion to withdraw that plea. Douglas denied the motion and Collind was sentenced Monday. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
“My mother stabbed my dad in the chest,” he said.
The dispatcher tried to ask more questions, but the sound on the other end of the call was chaos.
“What the (expletive) is wrong with you?” the boy shrieked at his mother.
His screams from that 911 call recorded on Feb. 22, 2017, rang out Monday in the York County courtroom where Kandee Collind sat in handcuffs.
Collind, 49, pleaded guilty last year to murder. She later tried and failed to withdraw that plea. A judge finally sentenced her Monday to 32 years in prison for fatally stabbing 42-year-old Scott Weyland in front of their two young children.
That sentence was the maximum allowed under her plea agreement. The prosecutor from the Maine Attorney General’s Office argued for that full amount, while the defense attorney asked for the minimum possible penalty of 25 years.
Scott Weyland in an August 2016 photo on Facebook
Superior Court Justice Wayne Douglas said he wanted to credit Collind for pleading guilty and sparing her children the trauma of a trial, but he also emphasized the seriousness of the crime committed in front of them.
“They tried to help their father as he lay dying,” Douglas said. “There is a profound, potentially long-term impact on children who witness domestic violence and domestic violence homicide.”
Attorneys and family members described a bitter custody dispute that dragged on for months before the fatal confrontation in an Acton driveway. The couple married in 2009 and separated in 2016. Collind apparently received the final divorce judgment in the mail the day before the stabbing, and it included the news that a judge awarded physical custody of the children to Weyland, in part because of concerns about her living situation.
Assistant Attorney General Meg Elam described the way Collind drove to Weyland’s mother’s house that morning, ignoring the pleas of her family members and an active protection-from-abuse order. Collind crashed the car in the driveway and stormed out to confront her ex-husband. Weyland recorded her coming toward him, and Elam played a video clip from his cellphone during the sentencing.
“You wrecked my life,” she screamed at him in the video.
“Get away from me,” he replied.
The phone was knocked to the ground before the stabbing. Elam said Weyland did not die immediately, but tried to call 911 and asked his 11-year-old son to do so as well.
“Imagine what he was thinking, dying, bleeding out in front of his own children,” Elam said.
Jeromy Lehoux, nephew of Scott Weyland, wipes a tear while his wife, Danielle, reads his statement to the court during Monday’s sentencing of Kandee Weyland Collind for the 2017 murder of Scott Weyland, her ex-husband. Gregory Rec/Staff Photographer
Defense attorney Verne Paradie did not speak in detail about Collind’s past, but he asked the judge to consider the findings of multiple psychological reports and other reports about her tumultuous life.
“The court is required to not only dole out punishment, but to do so with tempered mercy, to consider the individual factors of a person who stands in front of you,” Paradie said.
Before the judge announced her sentence, Collind delivered a rambling statement in court, apologizing to her former sister-in-law in one moment and in another wondering why Weyland did not stop her from stabbing him.
“There was abuse, and look what I did in the end,” she said. “There was abuse for 13 years, and look what I did in the end.”
She said she thinks about Weyland and her children every day, and she worried about how the stabbing would impact them in the future. She said her memory of the incident is “hazy.”
“Most murderers, when they do something violent like that, they are a little hazy,” she said. “However, my kids unfortunately had that memory.”
Family members of both Collind and Weyland also spoke at the hearing.
Weyland’s relatives described him as a kind man who loved his children. His cousin, Crystal Tobias, said Weyland’s mother could not bear the stress of his death and has since died. His sister, Melody Weyland, described supervising weekly visits with him during the custody battle. She said the kids would yell “I love you” out the window as she drove them away from the house, and her brother would break down crying at night when they were gone.
“The defendant says that he ruined her life,” Melody Weyland said. “When in fact he gave her life, he gave her two beautiful children that she held no regard for when she took his life in front of him.”
Collind’s aunt, Judy Chick, remembered that her niece loved working in elder care and helping her children decorate Christmas cookies. She said the couple fought for years but stayed together because of their children, and the custody battle brought Collind into the worst depression of her life.
“Kandee was not this monstrous, heartless murderer that people want to portray her as,” Chick said. “She is, however, the product of a 10-month brutally long and exhausting court battle that ended in tragedy.”
Douglas acknowledged the hardships in Collind’s life, including abuse in her childhood and financial hardships in her adulthood.
“She bears the emotional and psychological scars from these life experiences as reflected in her long involvement with the mental health system and her dependence on medicines,” Douglas said. “All of that certainly set the stage for what happened on Feb. 22, but it did not predestine it. It did not cause it.
“Ultimately, she made the choice to go to the Weyland home, to go there with her children, to go there with a knife in her pocket.”
Collind did not visibly react to the sentence. Before the jail guard escorted her out, she turned around to look at her family and said, “Bye.”
“Bye, honey,” one woman responded.
The children did not attend the sentencing.
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