Crown prosecutors say it was inevitable that five-year-old Phoenix Sinclair's life would come to a brutal end.

In closing arguments to the jury Friday morning, Crown lawyer Rick Saull said Phoenix was abused by her guardians for months before her death in 2005.

Phoenix's mother Samantha Kematch and her common law husband Karl Wesley McKay are both charged with first-degree murder for killing the young girl.

Saull said Phoenix was forced to eat her own vomit and neither of the accused cared whether she lived or died.

He told the jury there is no way to know which was the fatal blow that killed Phoenix Sinclair. He said instead it was an ongoing pattern of abuse.

He told the jury that Kematch and McKay brutalized the girl before leaving her to die naked on a basement floor.

Saull said she knew she shouldn't come upstairs because she would get a beating.

"That wasn't normal parenting but the illegal domination of a child," he said.

"You just have to hold a small child once in a lifetime to know what a fragile little life that is."

Saull also suggested Kematch helped wrap her daughter in garbage bags and drove her body to a remote site rather than take her for medical help.

Defense lawyers conceded that Kematch and McKay were responsible for Sinclair's death. But they argued their clients did not confine the girl to the basement, and therefore are not guilty of first-degree murder.

With files from the Canadian Press and a report from CTV's Kelly Dehn