Man jailed five years for link to slayings

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This article was published 11/05/2020 (2185 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Manitoba man was sentenced Monday to five years in prison for his role in the shooting deaths of two suspected drug dealers.

Jason Andrew Bruyere, 29, previously pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter in the February 2017 killings of Jody Brown, 34, and Steven Chevrefils, 35, at a St.-Georges home.

Last month, Claude Francis Guimond, the shooter and a former school principal in Sagkeeng First Nation, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and was sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 14 years.

Court heard Monday that Bruyere visited the home knowing Guimond would be following him inside minutes later with a gun. Bruyere told police it was their plan only to scare the two victims, not kill them.

Bruyere was originally charged with two counts of first-degree murder.

“(Bruyere) was the one who went there knowing the people in the house,” Crown attorney Chris Vanderhooft told provincial court Judge Robert Heinrichs.

“What we cannot say is that (he) definitely knew when they went there that Claude Guimond was going to use the firearm or what would happen when they arrived,” he said.

Court heard Bruyere had been drinking and taking drugs for days when he and his girlfriend’s father, Guimond, who had also been drinking, came up with a plan that night to “scare” the victims.

Bruyere’s 21-year-old sister was addicted to meth when she died of a drug overdose just months earlier, said defence Jonathan Pinx.

“Mr. Bruyere believed the victims in this case were the local dealers of such substances in the community and his intention was to scare them so they would stop dealing,” Pinx said.

Court heard Bruyere had entered the home on the pretext of buying drugs when he was followed minutes later by Guimond, armed with an assault rifle and wearing camouflage clothing.

Guimond confronted the two victims in the basement where there was a marijuana grow operation. Guimond shot Brown once in the chest and Chevrefils twice in the head and chest. One of the bullets ricocheted through the basement ceiling, grazing a woman in the head.

Police initially arrested Bruyere, who they believed was the shooter, but later focused their attention on Guimond, who had denied ever being in the house.

After a lengthy investigation, police surreptitiously obtained a sample of Guimond’s DNA, matching it to bullet fragments and shell casings found at the scene.

Later, while in custody, Guimond was caught on the phone admitting to a family member he had been at the house that night.

“The RCMP investigation was exhaustive and left no stone unturned,” Vanderhooft said. “We might have proceeded against Jason Bruyere if it wasn’t for the willingness of the RCMP not to have tunnel vision, to step back and look at the whole investigation.”

Support letters provided to court described Bruyere as a well-intentioned, community-minded man and dedicated father.

No matter their lifestyle, Brown and Chevrefils didn’t deserve their fates, Heinrichs said.

“They did not deserve to be killed in… what might be described as vigilante fashion,” he said.

Combine intoxication, bad judgment and firearms “and it’s not completely unforeseen that something more than scaring (the victims) would have happened,” he said.

Bruyere received credit for time served, reducing his remaining sentence to three and a half years.

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca