Home invader jailed nine years for ‘cruel’ sex assault he says he can’t remember

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This article was published 26/06/2017 (3038 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

He walked 1.2 kilometres in the middle of the night, put a mask over his face and broke into a home where a mother and her young daughter were sleeping. He threatened to hurt the child if her mother didn’t comply with his demands, and then he committed a “cruel” sexual assault, biting the woman and pulling her by the hair.

Before he left more than an hour later, he warned her not to call the police, or he would “come and get you.” And he did return soon after to steal her cellphone.

Harland James Thiessen says he remembers none of it. But the 25-year-old Winkler man’s DNA connected him to the crime scene, and he’s now serving a nine-year prison sentence.

“He told police that it was not possible that he was at someone else’s home or that his DNA could be found at the scene,” provincial court Judge Rocky Pollack said as he handed down the sentence on June 23.

Thiessen told investigators he’d been drinking heavily that night in July 2014 and remembered returning home to Winkler from a social in Winnipeg and vomiting twice. The victim named three men, including Thiessen, as possible suspects in the attack. He was the only one to refuse to provide a DNA sample. But after he asked for a cigarette during his police interview, investigators sent the butt for analysis. It came back a match.

Thiessen pleaded guilty after a separate DNA analysis requested by his defence lawyer, Jody Ostapiw, confirmed the results.

Thiessen “was incredulous and aghast at his actions and does accept that he engaged in the actions attributed to him,” according to a psychological assessment provided to the judge.

The victim, meanwhile, has suffered extreme anxiety. She doesn’t go for evening walks anymore and can’t be in crowds of people, she wrote in a victim impact statement.

“I have to try and somehow explain to my daughter why mommy’s hands shake all the time and why I never go to functions that have bigger crowds,” she wrote.

Pollack noted Thiessen’s chronic addiction to alcohol and opioids, as well as past counselling he underwent during his 2008 probation — part of his previous, minor criminal record. He took a 12-week anger-management and domestic-violence course in which he acknowledged the role alcohol and drugs played in fuelling his short temper.

“I do not accept that the dangers of gross intoxication were entirely unforeseeable to Mr. Thiessen,” the judge said.

“While I do not infer that six years later (after completing counselling), the offender should have been able to predict the commission of these specific offences, it’s not as if the intoxicated perpetrator he turned into that night was a stranger to him,” the judge said, describing the crimes he committed as “personal and brutal.”

Thiessen has eight years and five months of his sentence left to serve for sexual assault causing bodily harm, breaking and entering, uttering threats and disguise with intent. The Crown had recommended a sentence of 10 years or more, while the defence requested a five-year sentence, arguing Thiessen began to have “consciousness of guilt” of the attack only two years after it happened and has since enrolled in additional treatment programs.

He will be listed as a registered sex offender for life and was also ordered to repay the victim $432 for home repairs and medication she purchased as a result of the break-in and attack.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay