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For a month during the late winter of early 2007, Peacha Atkinson had been sitting in an Edmonton courtroom listening to her daughter Nina Courtepatte being described as a simple street kid, a gullible girl who lived in the fantasy world of West Edmonton Mall.

"Nina was not a mall rat," Peacha said defiantly.

After weeks of enduring horrific testimony in the trial of Michael Briscoe and Joseph Laboucan, accused of the torture, rape and murder of the 13-year-old, the diminutive woman could take it no longer and spoke out against the image being painted of her daughter in court.

"That's not at all who she was," Atkinson insisted while speaking to the Edmonton Sun's Andrew Hanon.

"She only started going there and she certainly didn't hang out there every day. She didn't spend a lot of time at the mall."

Nina, a pretty, petite girl was an aspiring model and actress, her mother said.

Shortly before she died, Nina had won a modelling contest and her mother was in the process of enrolling her at a local modelling school.

Nina also had the thrill of being an extra in a film being shot in Edmonton. It was an experience that inspired Hollywood ambitions.

"She could draw, too," Atkinson said.

As she would later tell the court in the trial of a second teen charged with her daughter's death, Peacha described her daughter as assertive.

She recalled a time for the Sun she and her then-10-year-old daughter were waiting in a bus shelter.

Nina asked her mother about the meaning of a sign showing a cigarette in a red circle with a line through it.

As her mother explained what it meant, a man entered the shelter with a lit cigarette in his mouth.

"Can you read?" Nina demanded of him. The man nodded and she pointed at the sign.

The man ruefully put out his smoke and said, "I've never been told off by a little kid before."

"That's the kind of person she was," Atkinson said.

"She felt very strongly that rules were rules, no matter who you were. And she'd speak up to anyone who was breaking them."

"And Nina cared deeply about people who were being picked on."

The grade seven student has been described by her classmates as a fun girl who had lots of friends. They saw no signs she was using drugs or alcohol.

Nina had won a $500 certificate in a Chan International model search contest at Klondike Days in 2004.

The agonizing experience of sitting through the trial galvanized Peacha Atkinson into taking political action.

"Some days are really, really hard," she said.

Because the three teens charged were all underage at the time of the killing, they cannot be named due to restrictions in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. Atkinson said she thought that was an outrage.

She announced that was helping to organise a rally and petition drive at the Edmonton Law Courts building on March 5th, 2007 to pressure Ottawa to toughen the Act.

Atkinson wanted all youth accused of violent crime to be tried as adults so their identities can be made public.

"I believe if that's the case, youth crime will go down," she said. "It's very important even to get youth to realise this has to stop ... especially the serious crime, the horrendous crime."

She also wanted "life to mean life, not 10 or 15 years. People convicted of crimes serious enough to get sentenced to life should serve their full sentence behind bars."

Atkinson said families who've been victimised by teen violence will be there and hopes there will be a large turnout to send a clear signal to Ottawa.

"If the people in power had this sort of thing happen to their loved ones, you'd bet things would change quickly," she said.

A web site, Nina's Fight for Justice, had been set up for those wanting to sign Peacha Atkinson's petition.

The web site is maintained by outspoken prostitute and Edmonton sex-trade advocate Carol-Lynn Strachan.

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