Attacker jailed 23 years for night of vicious sex attacks

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This article was published 01/05/2017 (3093 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 22-year-old man who beat and raped a teen girl and a woman, leaving one for dead in the freezing Assiniboine River, has been sentenced to 23 years in prison.

Justin Hudson was sentenced Monday for the brutal attacks, which happened within hours of each other on Nov. 8, 2014. He has 19 years and four months left to serve behind bars after being given credit for the time he has already spent in custody. Hudson did not react when provincial court Judge Tim Killeen imposed the sentence. It fell short of the life sentence Crown prosecutor Debbie Buors was seeking. Hudson’s defence lawyer Amanda Sansregret had asked for a 12- to 14-year prison term.

“He was presented with an opportunity and brutalized each woman because he could not control his rage. That rage has to be controlled,” Killeen said.

“The accused must be separated from society for a long time to protect others and to denounce his crimes. However, his background, his limitations, his history of being abused and neglected lead to a conclusion that his responsibility has not risen to the point where a life sentence is needed,” Killeen said.

The case, involving a 16-year-old girl and a 23-year-old woman who can’t be identified under a publication ban, got national attention and prompted public outcry and calls for stiff justice. One of the victims was present in court Monday for the sentencing.

Hudson’s co-accused, who was 17 at the time of the attacks, also pleaded guilty to two counts of aggravated sexual assault. He will be sentenced as an adult, but a date has not yet been set.

Hudson, who has been described by his lawyer as a “poster child” for failures in the child-welfare system, has been assessed as showing signs of anti-social personality disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, substance-abuse disorder and cognitive difficulties. He was sexually abused by a relative when he was six years old and was raised by an aunt he believed was his mother before he was shuffled in and out of foster-care placements.

The violence he inflicted on the two victims during the attacks may have been his way of feeling powerful and relieving the anger he felt toward his mother, who struggled with addictions, court heard.

“The horror of his upbringing in no way justifies what he did to those two innocent victims, but the forces that brought him here cannot be ignored,” Killeen said. “They are why a sentence of life cannot be justified.”

Hudson and the co-accused went out to celebrate the youth’s birthday with a plan to break into cars. Then, in separate attacks within hours, they walked up behind their victims on dark city streets and assaulted, raped and robbed them.

Near the Midtown Bridge shortly after midnight 12:30 a.m., they caught up with the 16-year-old girl,who had been separated from her friends. The attackers lured her under the bridge and started punching her. She fought back and tried to protect herself, but they sexually assaulted her before taking her shoes and jacket and leaving her in the frigid river.

She managed to travel 100 metres in the water and then climb up an embankment. But when she got up, she was hit with a hammer and left on the riverwalk path, where she was found unconscious and hypothermic by a passerby just before 7 a.m.

In the meantime, while walking in a back lane behind the Sherbrook Pool, a 23-year-old woman realized Hudson was following her, and when she turned around to look, he hit her across the face with a baseball bat. He continued to beat her and ordered her to take off her clothes.

Both attackers sexually assaulted her while she was “pouring blood from her face, the inside of her mouth and from the… wound to the back of her head,” court heard. The woman was repeatedly sexually assaulted and forced to stay with the man and youth, who stole her phone and led her first to an abandoned car, and then to a residence on Sherbrook Street.

Eventually, they let her go, but only after they encountered another man and woman in a back lane. The woman was yelling and Hudson and the youth yelled at the man to leave her alone before chasing him with the baseball bat; he returned, saying he’d broken the weapon on the man.

The 23-year-old victim sought help at a 7-Eleven, where she explained the attack to customers who, in a shocking coincidence, were related to Hudson. They offered to walk with her to get help, but she took off before they finished paying for their purchases. Hudson was arrested a few days later after his family confronted him and then called police.

The 23-year-old woman was in the courtroom Monday. She previously told the Free Press she did not expect an apology from either of her attackers. Hudson declined to say anything when given an opportunity during an earlier court appearance.

“I don’t really expect anything from them. I recognize that what they’re going through now and what they’re going to go through over the whole course of their life from now on — they’ve completely changed their lives. They’ve put labels on themselves, and there’s consequences because of it, and I think that that is enough for me,” she said last December.

The 16-year-old girl who was found hypothermic, half-naked and nearly dead on the riverbank went into cardiac arrest in hospital and has had to undergo several surgeries that have left her with lasting scars.

In a victim-impact statement, she wrote she remembers only fragments of that night: “Dark. Cold. Pain.”

“I wish I could forget those memories. But I never will,” she wrote. “After beating me with weapons, you left my body, naked and nearly dead. You stole my jacket and shoes and took my iPod. And then you posted a picture on Facebook of yourself wearing my clothes. When I saw that later, I was sickened that you felt so little remorse and instead bragged about what you had just done.”

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay