Five years and four months in jail for a McBride senior citizen who pleaded guilty to sexual interference of his granddaughter.
Provincial Court Judge Peter McDermick imposed the sentence after a day-long hearing on Jan. 27 in Prince George. A publication ban protects information that could identify the victim.
Crown prosecutor Kristina King asked McDermick to send the man to jail for six years. The man’s defence lawyer, Mohammad Hajivandi, proposed a three-year sentence.
McDermick said the aggravating factors are “powerful and easy to justify,” specifically the breach of trust, age of the victim and length of the man’s offending. The man’s remorse, acceptance of responsibility, efforts at rehabilitation and low risk of reoffending weighed in the man’s favour.
“We emphasize that sexual offences against children are inherently wrongful,” McDermick said.
“There are poignant mitigating features, but the offence, per se, and the aggravating factors are so serious that the mitigating factors do not cause me to conclude that this ultimate sentence can be untethered from that six-year result.”
In the end, McDermick said the sentence should be at the lower end of the five-to-six-year range.
Court heard the man groomed the victim, beginning on her ninth birthday in 2019. He began by cuddling and touching her and then progressed to sex acts, sometimes using sex toys and watching pornographic videos together.
The girl and her family visited the man’s house in McBride in July 2024 while en route to a wedding in Prince George. During her stay, the grandfather locked his granddaughter with him in the sauna where they engaged in sexual activity.
The girl’s father found her in the sauna alone with his father, became suspicious and an argument ensued.
During the family’s drive to Prince George, the daughter told her father that her grandfather touched her on the chest and other areas of her body.
“The accused’s son did a U-turn toward McBride and filed a complaint with the McBride RCMP,” King told McDermick.
The girl later gave a statement to police. The grandfather was arrested Aug. 15, 2024.
In a tearful speech to McDermick, the man said he was undergoing counselling for an addiction to pornography. He said he owes sincere apologies to many, but mostly his wife and granddaughter.
“Words cannot convey my abject horror and shame of what I did to you,” he said, referring to the girl. ‘I'm heartbroken. I destroyed your childhood and ruined our family. I'm so truly sorry.”
Earlier, Hajivandi said his client received death threats which were reported to the RCMP. He said he never intended for the case to go to trial.
“Soon after I was retained, and from the first meeting, I knew that he intends to plead guilty,” Hajivandi said. “He did not want his granddaughter to come to court, because her best interest was always top of his mind.”
King read victim impact letters from the girl’s grandmother, other grandfather and aunts.
The grandmother said her knees “literally buckled” when she was told her husband committed the sex crimes.
“I cried and blamed myself out loud for not protecting her, not saying what I had suspected for years,” she wrote.
One aunt described “emotional upheaval” that caused episodes of nausea. Another aunt said the harm to her niece is “serious and lasting. [The guilty man] only stopped because he got caught.”
The girl’s other grandfather said elders are supposed to be protectors, not predators. He said he has been wrongly “painted with the same brush,” due to mistaken identity.
“I am concerned for my granddaughter's safety,” he wrote. “She has lost her self-confidence and worth.”
Hajivandi opposed admission of the letters, because the writers were not people who had day-to-day interactions with the victim.
“How close were they to her before all these things happened?” Hajivandi said. “These are generic letters, and I would write the same about my feelings towards anybody who was talking about such an incident.”
King said the letters amply described the harm caused to the extended family, which made them victims under the law.
