I should have said:
Most of the time when these deaths have happened it wasn’t deliberate.
My understanding is that this is only the 2nd time a hockey player has been charged criminally. The other instance was Jim Boni, in 1992.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Boni
I’m not aware of any hockey deaths on the professional level, resulting from a neck slash with a skate. While I’m not a hockey player, the consensus from hockey players that I heard interviewed since the incident seems to be that past occurrences of this type are very rare, if they’ve ever happened at all.