‘Brutal’ rapist facing dangerous offender status, life in prison

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This article was published 27/08/2019 (2262 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A 39-year-old man found guilty of repeatedly raping a young woman in her Wolseley-area home now faces the prospect of being labelled a dangerous offender — a designation that could keep him in prison for life.

Jason Hikoalok was found guilty last week of sexual assault with a weapon, assault, forcible confinement and uttering threats to cause death in the 2017 attack on the then-19-year-old woman.

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.

“The sexual assaults the accused committed on the complainant were brutal,” Queen’s Bench Justice Vic Toews said in delivering his verdict. “The accused’s statement that the sexual contact at all times was… gentle flies in the face of and contradicts all the evidence that I accept.”

Prosecutor Chantal Boutin told court the Crown will be seeking an order that Hikoalok be sentenced as a dangerous offender.

Dangerous offenders receive indeterminate sentences and are only released from custody when corrections officials are satisfied it is safe to do so.

Court heard at trial Hikoalok and the victim had met only a few of times through mutual friends when Hikoalok showed up at her apartment door the evening of 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-year-old, and wrote pornographic and pedophiliac notes on her underwear.

The woman managed to flee the apartment around 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.

Hikoalok testified at trial and claimed the victim had called him looking for methamphetamine. He told court they smoked marijuana and meth, with the victim offering to exchange sex for more drugs. He alleged the victim had grabbed his remaining drugs when she bolted from the apartment.

Toews said Hikoalok’s testimony was “contrived and not to be believed.”

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 week-long 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.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca