Myles Sanderson, Sean Petrie and Nikolas Ibey, three men whose names I wish I had never heard — three men who brought death and carnage.
They are also three men with past violent convictions, which is now raising questions about how our justice system works, or in these cases, didn’t.
Sanderson, along with his brother, stabbed and killed 10 people and injured many more on the James Smith Cree First Nation in Saskatchewan. He had recently been granted statutory release after conviction on a number of assault and robbery charges.
His rap sheet for violent attacks — including assaulting his wife, assaulting a police officer and stabbing his father-in-law, who later he killed in his Sept. 3 massacre — goes back more than a decade.
Sanderson had even violated the conditions of his release, was taken back into custody, and then released again.
It’s fair to question whether this massacre would have taken place if he had been kept in prison. Given his long record, I have trouble understanding why his sentences weren’t longer and he was free to terrorize his community.
Sean Petrie wasn’t in jail or on parole when he shot and killed Toronto Police Const. Andrew Hong and auto body shop owner Shakeel Ashraf on Monday, but he too has had a long and lasting relationship with the justice system.
Over the last 20 years, Petrie was convicted of weapons and drug charges, robbery and other petty crimes. He faced child pornography charges in 2015 and a robbery charge in 2016, but in both instances the cases were dropped.
He didn’t appear to have any major brushes with the law after that until he sought out Const. Hong after waiting for hours in a Mississauga Tim Hortons.
Nikolas Ibey is another matter.
The 33-year-old Ottawa man is now facing a murder charge in the death of 22-year-old Savanna Pikuyak.
Ibey has a violent past with women and earlier this year was given a 45-day sentence for assaulting his former girlfriend as well as breaking and entering, uttering threats and failing to comply with his release order. It’s unbelievable that this is what the sentence is for these charges, but this is our system.
As the Ottawa Sun’s Blair Crawford reported earlier this week, the conviction wasn’t the first time Ibey had been violent with women he was close to.
Lori Roche told Crawford that in May 2021, Ibey had thrown a rock through her window. She had a restraining order put in place, which he routinely ignored, as did the police she said when she called to report him.
“I said, ‘This is how women end up dead.’ I told the probation officer that,” Roche said.
Now a woman is dead following a pattern of violence and a justice system that failed Pikuyak, a young woman who had moved to Ottawa from Nunavut to start school just days before her death.
Supporters of the current system of bail, probation, parole, statutory release and a focus on rehabilitation will tell you that statistically, the system works. That most of the people set free from jail don’t offend again.
These three stories tell a different tale and in two of them – both Sanderson and Ibey having recently been in jail – I would call these spectacular failures.
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