Repeat rapist declared dangerous offender

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This article was published 13/06/2023 (876 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man convicted of repeatedly raping a young woman in her Wolseley home has been labelled a dangerous offender — a designation that could keep him in prison for the rest of his life.

Jason Hikoalok, 43, was found guilty in 2019 of sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement and uttering threats to cause death to the then-19-year-old victim.

As a dangerous offender, Hikoalok will remain in custody until National Parole Board officials are satisfied he no longer poses a danger to society.

“There is no reasonable expectation that the accused’s danger to the public can be adequately managed by any measure short of indeterminate incarceration,” King’s Bench Justice Vic Toews said Monday in a 45-page written decision.

Hikoalok — who was released from prison in Yellowknife in 2006, after serving an eight-year sentence for raping two young girls in Nunavut — admitted having sex with the Winnipeg woman but claimed it was consensual.

Prosecutors signalled they would be seeking a dangerous offender order for Hikoalok immediately after Toews convicted him. In the nearly four years since then, Hikoalok fired his lawyers and repeatedly claimed, without justification, that he had been denied opportunities to review disclosure in his case. At court hearings he was openly hostile and accused Toews of being a racist.

“It is very clear that the greatest impediment for Mr. Hikoalok to access any material necessary for the purposes of this hearing is directly attributable to his own conduct, attitude and behaviour,” Toews said. “It is evident that Mr. Hikoalok has done everything in his power to obstruct or delay these proceedings.”

Court heard at trial Hikoalok and the victim had met a few times through mutual friends when Hikoalok showed up at her apartment door in the evening on Oct. 28, 2017, asking if he could hang out for a couple of hours before going to a party.

The victim testified she and Hikoalok smoked marijuana and watched YouTube videos on her phone for a couple of hours.

“It was around midnight… and he pulls out this weird hatchet thing (from his backpack) and then his pocketknife, and he starts sharpening the pocketknife on the hatchet,” the woman told court. “He was saying, ‘These are the things I use to protect myself on the streets.’”

Hikoalok then pulled out a pipe and asked if he could smoke what the woman thought was crack. She said Hikoalok took three puffs “and he changed.… He just turned into a monster.”

Hikoalok put the hatchet to the woman’s throat and forced her to strip off her shirt and pants.

“He said, ‘Do whatever I want or I am going to kill you,’” the woman said.

Hikoalok repeatedly raped the woman over the course of the next eight hours, recording much of it on her cellphone, told her to pretend she was 12 years old and wrote pornographic and pedophiliac notes on her underwear.

The woman managed to flee the apartment at about 8 a.m., and screamed for help. Hikoalok ran after her, naked, and tried to pull her back into the apartment.

A neighbour intervened. Hikoalok struck the man on the head, ran back into the woman’s apartment to retrieve his belongings and fled.

In 2006, Hikoalok was released from prison in Yellowknife after serving his entire eight-year sentence for raping a four-year-old girl and a five-year-old girl.

According to media reports at the time, Hikoalok was transported to Iqaluit, where he was the subject of a weeklong court hearing to impose conditions on his release. A petition seeking to banish Hikoalok from the community garnered 1,200 signatures.

The Nunatsiaq News reported Hikoalok had expressed interest in returning to Cambridge Bay, where the offences occurred, or Kugluktuk, but relatives in those Nunavut communities didn’t want him there. Officials in those communities said they had no resources to monitor him or provide counselling.

Court heard evidence at his dangerous offender hearing that Hikoalok had a traumatic childhood that included watching his father murder his mother. He was sexually and physically abused by relatives and began abusing alcohol and drugs while still a child.

Since his 2017 arrest, Hikoalok has refused to participate in sex-offender treatment and other rehabilitative programming.

“The very apparent failure of Mr. Hikoalok to benefit from rehabilitation efforts to date and to reject all treatment and supervision, also provides evidence that there is no reasonable expectation or even a reasonable possibility of controlling risk,” Toews said.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca