Man sentenced to 10 years for fatal shooting

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 16/06/2022 (1359 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A Selkirk man has been sentenced to 10 years in prison after fatally shooting a woman with a homemade gun during a drug dispute.

Landace Blair Urbanovitch, 26, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the July 4, 2021, killing of 22-year-old Levi Liske.

“While there may not be adequate evidence he intended the firearm to go off, Mr. Urbanovitch is nonetheless guilty of a serious manslaughter because he decided to produce a homemade firearm in the course of a serious argument,” Crown attorney Catherine Basarab told provincial court Judge Julie Frederickson, at a sentencing hearing in Selkirk last week.

Court was told Urbanovitch, his girlfriend and Liske had been staying in the same house July 4, when shortly before 5 a.m. they became embroiled in a heated argument over drugs and money. A second man in the house told police he awoke to the sound of smashing noises in the kitchen and saw Urbanovitch enter the living room “in an aggressive manner” holding a homemade gun, Basarab told court.

The man said he watched Liske follow Urbanovitch into the kitchen and then heard a gunshot.

The man went into the kitchen, “saw Liske hunched over, appearing to be shot, and the accused still holding the firearm… appearing to be in shock,” Basarab said.

Urbanovitch fled the house on the pretext of getting help and police arrived a short time later to find Liske on the kitchen floor suffering from a single gunshot wound to the chest. She was pronounced dead minutes later.

Urbanovitch went to the RCMP detachment hours later claiming he had left the house the previous evening around 11 p.m. and denied shooting Liske.

In a neighbouring yard, police found a bloodied plaid shirt and two pieces of pipe that when fitted together created an improvised firearm, Basarab said. A spent shell casing was found in one of the pipes and Urbanovitch’s DNA was all over the weapon.

At the time of the killing Urbanovitch was bound by a release order that prohibited him from possessing weapons.

“Improvised firearms… are extremely crude in terms of their design, materials and method of assembly and depending on what they are made from they can be as dangerous to the user as the target,” Basarab said.

Urbanovitch’s internet search history showed he had searched how to make an improvised firearm. He also had pictures of the weapon on his phone. The weapons are considered “crime guns” because they are untraceable, Basarab said.

“People who put these together don’t understand the risk they are causing or are aware of it and are choosing to ignore it,” she said.

Liske was a kind young woman who would help anyone in need, but struggled with drugs during the last year of her life, her older sister Jade Doyle told court in a victim impact statement.

“Why a man would feel the need to pull a gun on a small young woman puzzles my family and myself,” Doyle said. “He took her life like it was nothing and left her lying there.”

dean.pritchard@freepress.mb.ca