Eight years for home invasion

A 25-year-old Yorkton man is headed to federal penitentiary having pleaded guilty to a May 15 home invasion and assault causing bodily harm.

Judge Patrick Reis sentenced Blaine Quewezance October 19 to a total of eight years in prison following a joint submission by the Crown and defence.

Quewezance pleaded guilty to one count of break and enter for which he received six years and  six months. Technically speaking, home invasion is an aggravating circumstance under the Criminal Code of the break and enter offence when an offender knows a dwelling house is occupied or uses violence against the occupants of the home.

The Court heard that on the evening of May 15, Quewezance and four others, wearing masks and brandishing weapons, broke into a downtown home and demanded drugs and money from two victims.

Quewezance also pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm for using a baseball bat to inflict a broken leg on one of the victims and a broken foot on the other.

When police responded to the incident, five suspects, including Quewezance, Darian Kamieniecki and three others, fled the scene in a stolen pickup truck. Following a brief high-speed chase, the truck slammed into a tree in the front yard of a residence near St. Mary’s Cathedral and the suspects got away on foot.

One youth was arrested shortly thereafter and police issued a warrant for Kamieniecki and Quewezance. The youth faces multiple charges and his case is still before the courts. Kamieniecki was arrested May 30. He has since pleaded guilty and received five years in prison.

Police finally caught up with Quewezance in September. Prosecutor Andrew Wyatt told the Court at the October 19 sentencing hearing that following a traffic stop September 2, Quewezance put the vehicle he was driving in reverse, rammed a police cruiser and took off. He then abandoned the vehicle and got away on foot. He eluded investigators for three more days until they tracked him to a residence in Kamsack.

Last week, on the same day Quewezance was being sentenced, Yorkton RCMP put out a public notice they are seeking information on the whereabouts of another suspect, Taylor Peequaquat, who is still at large. He faces nine criminal charges for his alleged role in the violent home invasion.

Quewezance will serve a consecutive one-year sentence for dangerous driving and a further six months for an unrelated domestic assault from March of this year to make up the total of eight years. He also received concurrent sentences for assault, possession of stolen property and obstruction of a peace officer. The Crown dropped 10 other charges noting that once finally in custody, Quewezance was cooperative with police admitting to the crimes and his involvement with a gang called the Native Syndicate.

Wyatt described the sentence as mid-range given Quewezance’s criminal record and the gang and drug connections of the case.

To complicate matters, at the time of these offences, Quewezance was already serving two consecutive six-month conditional sentences from September 2015 for assault and drug trafficking. He will serve the remainder of those sentences, just over six months, following his release from prison.

The defence, represented by Legal Aid counsel Richard Yaholnitsky did not add much except to cite the early guilty pleas as mitigating circumstances and request current surcharges along with some outstanding fines be defaulted and served concurrently.

Reis accepted the joint submission of eight years, defaulted the fines and surcharges and imposed the mandatory DNA order and 10-year weapons prohibition.

The judge warned Quewezance if he ends up before the Court again he would likely face dangerous offender status. He encouraged the young man to take advantage of programming in the federal corrections system to turn his life around.

One of the victims in this case, Nathan Ortynsky, is himself before the courts currently on home invasion charges. In September 2015, two masked men broke into an elderly couple’s home, assaulted them, tied them up and made off with a large amount of cash.

Ortynsky is charged with two counts of assault with a weapon, possession of a weapon for dangerous purpose, break and enter, disguise with intent to commit an offence, two counts of forcible confinement and two counts of robbery.

His next court appearance is November 15.