Tragedy claims two families

Opinion

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This article was published 15/09/2009 (5870 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Monday was sentencing day.

A day for tears from the other victims, the ones who never get to read their impact statements in court.

Not that Hugo Sergio Ruizfuentes’ family hasn’t wept before.

Over the last nine months — since the 41-year-old has been in jail awaiting his judicial fate — Jodi Holt, his common-law wife and the mother of his two youngest children, has wept for everyone.

She’s wept for Elaine Stoller, the woman Ruizfuentes killed last December while driving drunk, she’s wept for the 63-year-old grandmother’s family, and she’s wept for her own family.

Then Monday afternoon, at the Manitoba Law Courts, she wept again.

Associate Chief Justice Mary Kate Harvie sentenced her husband to six years in prison and a 15-year driving prohibition. That went beyond the five-year sentence the Crown asked for during sentencing submissions for the former exotic dancer turned renovation contractor, who pleaded guilty to impaired driving causing death.

Ruizfuentes had a long history of driving offences and he was not only drunk and speeding shortly before 10 p.m. on Dec. 2, he also had run three consecutive red lights on Grant Avenue. The third was at Waverley Street where his 1995 GMC pickup slammed into the driver’s door of Stoller’s 2003 Pontiac Vibe.

But there was another factor that seemed to influence Judge Harvie’s decision.

That was the Stoller family, standing and delivering their impact statements in front of her three weeks earlier.

Monday, after meeting with the Crown attorney, Elaine Stoller’s family left the Law Courts building stone-faced, without commenting.

So I turned to the other victims.

Jodi Holt was sitting outside the courtroom with her father and stepmother, Gerald and Faye Holt.

“I feel totally sorry for the Stollers,” Gerald said. “But you’ve got to realize that there’s the other side of it that’s every bit as sorrowful and tearful and anxiety-producing.”

Like the Stollers, Gerald Holt is Jewish, and he feels for Elaine’s three sons when they speak about all the religious holidays they’ll miss without their mother.

Ironically, Gerald Holt was a lawyer for Manitoba Public Insurance. He used to track down drunk drivers and hold them financially accountable.

Now 71, basically retired and in a second marriage, he struggles financially to help his 36-year-old daughter and his grandchildren. Jodi Holt works part time as a tour hostess, but summer is slow. She babysits.

She pulls together enough to just pay the mortgage on their small house in Norwood Flats.

But, more than anything, it’s being without her husband — the father of her little girls and teenage stepson — that’s been the toughest struggle.

And now a six-year sentence, even if it amounts to only four-and-a-half years with time already served awaiting his sentencing.

Jodi had enough trouble explaining their father’s nine-month absence to one daughter, 7, and a second daughter who just turned five.

In fact, she never really has.

Her seven-year-old knows, but only because her father wrote to her.

“He said, ‘Hi, Baby, I need to explain something to you,’ ” Jodi said.

” ‘Daddy made a big, big mistake. And he needs to pay for the mistake.’ Kinda of like when you have time-out. And he explained that when she has a time-out she has to go to her room. And when adults have time-out they have to go away for a long time. And that’s where he is. He’s having a time-out. An adult time-out.”

Then he wrote this. “I’m OK. And when I come home I’m going to be better.”

Eventually, Jodi took her seven-year-old for visits to the jail.

But not the younger daughter.

“My five-year-old has no idea,” Jodi said, her voice lowering to a whisper, as if the child were listening.

She understands he isn’t there, though and when her grandparents took her to a Chinese restaurant, she knew what to do when she dropped a coin in the wishing well.

“I wish my Daddy was coming home.”

All of this is sadly reminiscent of the struggles the Stollers expressed about trying to explain to their little girls where their grandmother has gone.

The difference, of course, is that while Hugo Sergio Ruizfuentes was sentenced to six years, he gave Elaine Stoller a death sentence.

She’ll never see her precious little girls. But he’ll see his.

 

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca