The Whitehorse teenager who killed her mother's live-in boyfriend in a fit of rage has been sent back to jail to await sentencing after her lawyers and probation officers have failed to come up with an acceptable plan.

She has been out on bail since January of last year. In that time, she has gone from being a failing student who was taking drugs and fighting, to a nominee for class valedictorian at her recent graduation.

The couple who has been caring for her since her release almost 18 months ago is heartbroken.

"We've been crying for two days,” the husband told the Star Monday.

"We knew this was coming, but it doesn't make it any easier.”

Although the girl has lived with the couple throughout her trial – and her final year of high school – they have never had any legal authority as guardians, nor have they received any financial assistance from the Yukon government.

"We were nothing more than a surety on a bail order,” the husband said. "They never gave us any credibility as her guardians, nothing.

"I said, ‘What happens if she breaks a tooth, guys? What happens if she's in a bad car accident?' We had no authority to make any emergency decisions for her welfare.

"We have done this on our own from the start and we finally had to draw the line.”

Monday's sentencing hearing was the first time the couple did not come to court with the girl.

Instead, the girl's legal aid lawyer, Gord Coffin, stood up and told the court that the couple was no longer willing to care for her without some financial assistance, and the plan was to send her to live with her mother in a hotel until the end of July. After that, he said, she would go to Ontario to live with her aunt.

The girl's mother is currently facing impaired driving charges and during the murder trial told the court she is an alcoholic.

The girl originally pleaded guilty to manslaughter, but was tried for second-degree murder. The judge accepted her plea and acquitted her of murder.

The mother's inability to kick her unemployed boyfriend out of the house for more than three years after they ceased having a romantic relationship was noted again and again in the trial, as was her habit of going to a bar after work and passing out on the couch immediately after dinner each night.

That is where she was when her 16-year-old daughter stabbed the man to death.

There was no evidence of sexual or physical abuse in the home, but the mother described her live-in boyfriend as a "psychologically abusive” man who never helped around the house and constantly picked on her daughter.

Judge John Faulkner, who heard the trial and is in charge of sentencing the girl, was clearly angry with the whole situation yesterday.

Given the choice between sending her to stay with her mother, an option he has rejected numerous times, and sending her to the juvenile hall, he chose the latter.

"I see no alternative but to remand the offender into custody,” he said. "I really wish there was another way.”

At the last sentencing hearing, he essentially told the girl's lawyers and probation supervisors to come up with a plan to prevent her having to go jail for manslaughter.

The family who has been caring for her proposed such a plan. They are moving to Edmonton, and said they were happy to take the girl with them, as she has been accepted at the University of Alberta, but said they needed some sort of financial assistance from the government.

They have children of their own, one of whom they are putting through university, and they live on the husband's police pension, they told the court.

They have received no more than $1,200 in support from the family over the past year and a half, the husband said yesterday, money which he suspects came from the girl's teenaged brother.

"We would have taken her, all they had to do was make us an offer,” he said. "They never even made us an offer to say no to.”

After the hearing Monday, the girl's father exploded out of the courtroom, cursing the family who has cared for his daughter since January 2010.

The girl's mother and father are separated. Neither paid for her legal defence.

The government has not given the couple one cent to help pay for the girl's living expenses, according to the husband.

"These people, they don't care about kids,” the caregiver told the Star. "They see her as a unit, that's it. They don't want to spend any money on someone they see as a bad kid – it's become this political thing within the department.”

But following Monday's hearing, the government is paying for the girl to stay in the youth detention centre.

No one at the Department of Health and Social Services, which runs the centre, could tell the Star how much it costs to house a youth there.

It costs between $300 and $350 a day to keep an adult in the Whitehorse Correctional centre. The smaller the number of inmates, the higher average the cost, noted spokesman Dan Cable.

Foster parents receive $31.52 a day to care for a child.

Though Health and Social Services refused to give the couple any money, officials offered to "facilitate” negotiations between the caregivers and the girl's parents, the husband said. He said he and his wife refused to be put in the position of trying to get money out of the parents every month.

One of the things that most upset the couple who have been caring for the girl is the care-plan report written in the last few weeks. It states that the "most

healthy environment” for the girl is with her aunt in Ontario, her caregiver told the Star.

"If you said it's more cost-effective to send her to her aunt, I could live with that,” he said, "but to say it's healthier? I drove that kid to school every morning; she has a closet full of clothes she never had before; she has money in the bank because we taught her about saving money. She finished this year as an honour roll student; she was failing when she came to live with us.

"You call that unhealthy?”

And though much of the blame for why a seemingly normal 16-year-old girl would snap and kill a man has been heaped on her mother, the caregiver puts just as much responsibility on the government.

"They failed this kid from six years old on. They've always failed her,” he said. "What she did was terrible, but if she had grown up in my house, she never would have done what she did.

"Now she's got to be exposed to bad kids in jail and she's going to assimilate because she'll have to.”

Officials from Health and Social Services did not respond to the Star's request for comment and information before press time this afternoon.

Judge Faulkner reserved his sentencing decision until Thursday.