Photo: Nicholas Johansen
The alley where the dispute took place in March 2019.
A local man will spend nearly a month in prison after drinking a glass of wine to celebrate his recent engagement, violating the terms of the suspended sentence.
Brandon Matechuk returned to the court in Kelowna on Thursday morning to pronounce the sentence, after he admitted last month that he had violated the “no alcohol” condition in his probation order.
Matechuk was in court last year when he was sentenced to nine months probation for pointing a rifle at his neighbor and threatening him on the morning of March 22, 2019 over a dispute over the placement of garbage cans.
A suspended sentence is served outside prison under a number of conditions. If the conditions are violated, the remainder of the sentence or part of it may be served in custody.
As a result of his guilty plea in the case, Matechuk was sentenced to three months of house arrest, followed by three months of curfew, followed by three months of no restrictions on leaving home. But one of the 15 conditions of the nine-month suspended sentence was to abstain from alcohol at all times.
On the evening of May 6, six months after his sentence, Matechuk and his girlfriend celebrated their previous engagement. Matchuk’s curfew had just expired.
He says he drank a glass of wine with his fiancé to raise a toast to their engagement, and returned home shortly after 11 p.m.
On his way home to Vernon, Matechuk passed an intersection just as the light turned red and an RCMP officer stopped him. Matechuk was instructed to take a breathalyzer and he blew 0.037%. Although this is below the legal limit for driving a vehicle, it violated his non-alcoholic condition on his probation order and he was arrested.
“It is very serious that he has violated [conditional sentence order], this is for a very stupid reason. However, it is at the lower end of the spectrum compared to other possible violations, “Matechuk’s defender Nicholas Jacob said on Thursday.
“If I were a defendant, I would ask the court to possibly consider not taking any action, given that he has spent several days in prison and that his CSO has been extended by one month. But Mr. Matechuk explicitly instructed me to agree on the merits of the Crown’s position.
As such, Crown Prosecutor David Ruse and Matechuk agreed to spend another 27 days in prison before being released on parole again.
“I just wanted to apologize, it was a stupid mistake and I shouldn’t have done it,” Matechuk told Judge Gary Weatherill. “It was incredibly stressful and I will definitely never do it again, I just want you to know.”
Matechuk’s fiancé, who was not involved in the 2019 incident, was in court in Kelowna on Thursday to support him.
Matechuk’s initial allegations stemmed from a dispute with his neighbor near Richter Street and Birch Avenue in Kelowna, which had been raging for several weeks until he reached his head on the morning of March 22, 2019. What happened before the threat was a dispute over at the time of the sentence, but Matechuk’s then-girlfriend said she had an “oral exchange” with their neighbor after she moved trash cans behind her car in the morning.
Crown prosecutor David Rousse said at the sentencing last November that Matechuk’s then-girlfriend claimed that their neighbor “said words in the sense that he would bring his motorcycling friends to deal with her”.
She called Matechuk “uncontrollably crying” and told him that their neighbor had threatened her.
Then Matsechuk knocked on his neighbor’s door, aimed a loaded rifle at him, and said, “I’m not mistaken, I’m not calling the cops.”
The March 22, 2019 incident provoked a massive police reaction in the area and Matechuk was arrested. In addition to the rifle, the police also found an SKS rifle with five free cartridges in the bag and without locking the trigger of the pistol. At the time, Matechuk did not have a firearms license.
“For me, it was not about garbage cans, but about trying to be safe at home,” Matechuk told Justice Weatherill in November. “I just did the wrong thing.”
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