Tragic details of woman shot during murder of Jonathan Bacon revealed
Credit to Author: David Carrigg| Date: Fri, 23 Aug 2019 22:38:17 +0000
A tragic side-note is included in a B.C. Court of Appeal ruling that dismisses an appeal made by one of two men who conspired to murder slain gangster Jonathan Bacon.
In the three-justice ruling released Friday, it says a young woman who was an unintended victim in the high-profile Kelowna murder in the summer of 2011 had suffered horribly since the event.
“Ms. (Leah) Hadden-Watts was shot once in the back of the neck and sustained horrific injuries,” the ruling says. “As a result of her injuries, Ms. Hadden-Watts has no voluntary motor or sensory function below the C5 in her spinal cord. As such, she has no functional capacity in her legs and only limited capacity in her upper extremities.
“Since the shooting, she has developed severe osteoporosis and experienced a spontaneous fracture of her lumbar spine. Due to the severity of her osteoporosis, it is likely that spontaneous fractures will reoccur. Her life expectancy has been reduced to approximately 70 per cent of that of a person without a spinal cord injury.”
Hadden-Watts was 21 when she was shot — one of five people in a Porsche Cayenne — by a group of men acting on the directions of Jujhar Khun Khun and Michael Jones as part of a gangland tit-for-tat. She was a friend of two of the men in the vehicle and is now 29 years old. According to Statistics Canada, the average life expectancy for a woman in Canada (born in 2000) is 80.4, so the court ruling indicates Hadden-Watts is expected to live only until age 56.
According to civil court records, Hadden-Watts has commenced several legal actions against people and organizations linked to the tragedy.
Paramedics load a victim into an ambulance in Kelowna on Aug. 14, 2011 after a shooting spree outside the Delta Grand Hotel. Gangster Jonathan Bacon was shot dead. (Photo: Don Sipos)
It’s Khun Khun who was appealing the parole-eligibility portion of his sentence for conspiracy to commit murder. Last year, he was given a 10-year sentence on top of eight years that he was given credit for having served as a result of five years and two months spent in pre-sentence custody (including a four-month stint in hospital). Under Canadian law, when a criminal is sentenced the time they have served in jail before the sentence gets credited as more than the actual time served, usually at a ratio of 1.5 to one.
Generally, a prisoner is allowed to apply for parole after serving one-third of the sentence. However, in Khun Khun’s case this parole eligibility time was set at one-half of the sentence, due to the “egregious nature of the offence,” that also put a number of bystanders at risk as it occurred in broad daylight in the parkade of a casino and hotel.
In Khun Khun’s case, if he had been given an 18-year sentence immediately after his arrest in February 2013, then under half-sentence parole eligibility he could get out on parole in February 2022. As it stands, applying the half-sentence eligibility to the 10-year sentence he received on top of the eight years credit for time served, he is eligible for parole in May 2023. He had argued the justice made an error when making the half-sentence parole eligibility order without considering his time in pre-sentence custody.
The appeal judges ruled that time spent in pre-sentence custody does not form part of the sentence for the purpose of determining one-half of the sentence and dismissed the appeal.
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