The silence in that courtroom carried more than the echo of a number; it carried the weight of lives already broken and a future deliberately sealed shut. For the families of the victims, no sentence could ever feel like enough, yet anything less than the harshest punishment might have sounded like denial, like the system turning away from the depth of their loss. An 86-year term became a symbol: society saying, with brutal clarity, that what happened can never be undone.