Riverdale and Diary Of A Wimpy Kid actor Ryan Grantham has been sentenced to life in prison after pleading guilty to the second-degree murder of his mother Barbara Waite. The 24-year-old Grantham fatally shot his mother in March 2020 and was sentenced at British Columbia Supreme Court in Vancouver on Wednesday.
Grantham, who played Jeffery Augustine in one episode of Riverdale, was initially charged with first-degree murder. He admitted to shooting his mother in the back of the head while she was playing piano at home in Vancouver.
After shooting his mother, Grantham then filmed her body on his Go-Pro, saying: I shot her in the back of the head. In the moments after, she would have known it was me’.
Prosecutors said the 24-year-old had also been plotting to kill theCanadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. In the hours after the murder, Grantham smoked weed and drank beer before putting three guns, ammunition and 12 Molotov cocktails, camping supplies and directions to Justin Trudeau’s house in his car. But after driving East out of Hope, Grantham turned around and headed to a police station in Vancouver and told an officer: ‘I killed my mother’.
Grantham had also contemplated driving to Lions Gate Bridge or Simon Fraser University, where he’d studied, to commit an act of mass violence before turning himself in, where he was taken into custody for the past two and a half years.
Since his arrest, Grantham has been enrolled in a mental health program, according to Deadline. His lawyers claimed during the trial that the actor had been struggling with clinical depression and anxiety in the months before killing his mother and had expressed a desire to harm other people and kill himself.
During his career as a child actor, Grantham appeared in episodes of Supernatural, Riverdale and the 2010 film adaptation of Diary Of A Wimpy Kid. He has now been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of his mother and won’t be eligible for parole until 14 years have passed.
‘I think he anticipated what the judge gave him as a sentence,’ Grantham’s lawyer told CTV. ‘I think he's pretty apprehensive about the whole thing. He's a fairly tiny person, and to go to the prison system, I'm sure it's a daunting and scary thought for him.’