Kimmirut child molester pleads guilty

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

After pleading guilty to sexual assault charges for the second time in less than 10 years, a 41-year-old Kimmirut man wants to serve his sentence in Nunavut and return to his community.

The man pleaded guilty to 11 charges involving several children and one adult when he appeared in court in Iqaluit last week.

The man, who cannot be identified under a court-ordered publication ban, has been convicted of the same offense before.

In October 1998, he was sentenced to a total of 30 months for two counts of sexual assault and a series of theft and fraud offenses. Those sexual assaults occurred more than 10 years apart, with the first in 1986. Both involved young boys, first in Kimmirut and then in Iqaluit.

This time, the man pleaded guilty to sexually assaulting seven other boys, aged nine to 13, and a 25-year-old man, between 1984 and 2003.

The boys included young children in the man’s family, each of whom woke up one night to find the man with his hand down their pants. He performed oral sex on some of the boys, and at least once tried to force his penis into a boy’s mouth.

Sixteen other sexual assault charges were dropped after negotiations between Crown and defence lawyers.

Crown lawyers are asking Justice Beverley Browne to impose a sentence of just over two years, which would require the man to serve time in a federal prison in the South, rather than in Nunavut, where he’s now serving time for more than a dozen fraud convictions.

Crown lawyer Christine Gagnon said she wants the court to look into preventing the man from returning to his community.

“I think he’s beyond rehabilitation,” she said. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to even consider [allowing him to return to Kimmirut].”

If he stays in Nunavut, the man won’t be able to take counselling programs for criminals convicted of sexual offences, because Nunavut has none, she said.

Defence lawyer Andy Mahar described the difficult time that the man has in prison in Iqaluit, where he’s been locked up in isolation for 23 hours a day for the past nine months, and suggested that his client would be even worse off if the judge sent him to a federal prison.

Mahar proposed that Browne allow him to serve his sentence in Nunavut, so that he could meet with elders for counselling.

“A lot of the help he needs is in the community he plans to return to,” Mahar said. “He just needs access to it.”

Mahar added that his client shouldn’t be blamed for problems that exist in his community.

“Kimmirut is a tormented community,” he said. “The levels of damage run deep. And that damage was not initiated by [this man]. That was Ed Horne.”

Mahar said the man was a victim of sexual abuse by the notorious sexual predator who was a teacher in Kimmirut in the 1980s. He was also molested by two teenagers over a period of five years in his community. The “very intrusive” abuse only stopped when he was big enough to fight back, Mahar said.

Gagnon agreed with the man’s defence lawyer that the judge should take the man’s turbulent upbringing into consideration when deciding where he should serve his sentence.

But Gagnon pointed out that the man used his own abusive past as a defence in his last trial, held before the same judge, in 1998.

Since then, he’s abused more boys, and also broken his parole conditions, when he sexually assaulted a man in Kimmirut last year.

Gagnon said the man also failed to show he wants to control his problem, adding that the court might consider having him evaluated by an expert to see if he fits the psychiatric definition of a pedophile.

She said the judge needs to sentence the man to “hard time” in prison to deter him from abusing another boy.

“How do we protect the community from him?” Gagnon said. “How will we make him think twice before touching a young person in a sexual way?

The man often lured his victims with promises. He invited them to see a carving in an elder’s home, or invited them to play a card game, sometimes while the man was babysitting them at home. He smoked marijuana with one of his victims.

Once, the man went into a house that wasn’t his own and assaulted a boy while he was sleeping.

In another case, one child woke up to find the man pulling the threads out of the crotch of his pants. The man went on to sexually assault the boy about 10 times over three years.

After one boy woke to find the man’s hand on his crotch, the man threatened to beat him up if he told anybody about the abuse. He offered money to others to keep the abuse a secret.

Judge Browne expects to sentence him this morning.