Zip gun-maker gets 4 ½ years in prison

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This article was published 17/12/2019 (2350 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Police call them “improvised firearms.”

On the street they go by a much less formal moniker: “zip guns.”

Whatever the name, these homemade weapons are becoming increasingly common and pose a grave danger to both the people who use them and their targets, a judge was told Tuesday.

“We’re dealing with something that is somewhat of a Winnipeg phenomenon,” Crown attorney Vanessa Gama said at a sentencing hearing for Leslie Beualieu, arrested at a Maryland Avenue home last May in possession of 11 zip guns, the largest single seizure by Winnipeg police ever.

“Improvised firearms are true crime guns,” Gama told Queen’s Bench Justice Chris Martin. “They are nearly impossible to trace, there are no serial numbers and they are completely unregulated.”

Beaulieu, 27, pleaded guilty to one count each of manufacturing firearms, possession of a prohibited firearm with ammunition, and possession of a firearm while prohibited. He was sentenced to 4 ½ years in prison.

Court heard members of the Winnipeg Police Service’s Guns and Gangs unit followed a suspect cyclist to a Maryland Avenue home, where they saw another man, Beaulieu, run from the kitchen and into an adjacent bedroom. Officers recognized Beaulieu from a recent bulletin alert and ordered him to exit the bedroom. When he did, officers spotted a sawed-off shotgun and “a number of improvised devices and tools strewn about the room,” Gama said.

After obtaining a search warrant, police seized 11 improvised firearms from the room, two of which were loaded and others in “various states of manufacture,” Gama said.

Interviewed by police, Beaulieu said “people would bring parts to him because he had developed a reputation as someone on the streets who could manufacture these improvised weapons,” Gama said. “People would bring parts to him… including pipes, nail guns. Someone brought him a piece of a lamp.”

When making one weapon, Beaulieu accidentally shot himself in the foot and had to go to the hospital.

“He didn’t know it was loaded, because there is no chamber, there is no safety,” Gama said. “That’s what makes them so extremely dangerous. By their very nature, they are more dangerous than a commercially made firearm.”

And the number of improvised firearms seized by police is rising. As of the end of September, police had seized 69 weapons this year, up from 52 for all of 2018.

In a stance that has been echoed by Winnipeg police, defence lawyer Wendy Martin-White tied the prevalence of zip guns to the city’s continuing meth crisis.

Beaulieu, Martin argued, was in the grip of meth psychosis when he started manufacturing the weapons to protect himself and others.

“He believes that was part of why he was involved in doing what he was doing,” Martin-White told court. “There was the paranoia about his safety and about other people’s safety, not rooted, obviously, in what you or I would typically think of as reality.”

Court heard Beaulieu became hooked on meth following his release from prison last year for a home invasion.

“I’ve never been attached to a drug like that,” he told Martin. “It pretty much took my life, took everything I ever owned. Feeling like I needed the drug to survive wasn’t something that I expected would happen to me.”

Martin told Beauleu he has the skills to build a productive life for himself, if he chooses.

“It seems to me that if you put your mind to it… and ask for help that you stand a chance of breaking out of this cycle… but that is on your shoulders,” he said.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca