Yorkton school bus driver jailed for sex assault

Man gets 15 months after admitting to four encounters with 14-year-old girl

A Yorkton man who was convicted of sexual assault and sexual touching after admitting to four sexual encounters with a 14-year-old girl he met while driving her school bus has been sentenced to 15 months in jail and a year on probation.

The man, who was 22 when he committed the offences in 2014 and 2015, was also ordered to comply with the Sex Offender Information Registration Act for 20 years, according to a sentencing decision handed down last month.

In his decision, Court of Queen’s Bench for Saskatchewan Justice Brian Barrington-Foote noted that the man — identified only as T.A.S. — had no criminal record and demonstrated himself as a good candidate for rehabilitation.

However, he wrote, “the sexual activity was not toward the low end of the scale” and T.A.S. “was in a position of trust, while the victim was a vulnerable 14-year-old who was eight years his junior, and suffered a significant impact.”

“This was an offence of considerable gravity, and (his) moral culpability is high,” he wrote after dismissing the man’s challenges to the constitutionality of the mandatory minimum sentence and sex offender registration requirement.

T.A.S., who is now 26 and has mild learning disabilities, had no prior sexual experience and was primarily home-schooled in a “highly structured, and strict Catholic environment” where sex was taboo, according the decision.

The girl — whose identity is protected by a publication ban — was a passenger on T.A.S.’s school bus route for three years, until she changed to a new bus route in June 2014, according to court documents.

At that point, the trial decision states, the girl began texting him frequently and ignored his requests that she stop — at one point, she told T.A.S. she blocked the numbers of boys at her school who asked for nude pictures.

T.A.S. testified at trial that he then asked her for nude pictures, hoping she would stop texting him. She sent him a picture and he blocked her number. Then he began receiving denigrating messages purportedly from her friends.

When T.A.S. returned to work in September 2014, the girl got on the bus outside her high school and told him she wouldn’t leave until he agreed to speak with her. Eventually, the decision states, he agreed to resume texting.

Over the next four months, there were four sexual encounters, including two instances of mutual oral sex, according to court documents. On one occasion, the decision states, he unblocked her number after she threatened suicide.

T.A.S. was arrested in January 2015, and subsequently charged. At trial, he was acquitted of one charge — inviting a sexual encounter with a person under the age of 16 — after Barrington-Foote concluded that the girl initiated the encounters.

In a victim impact statement, Barrington-Foote wrote in his sentencing decision, the girl expressed regret for having spent too much time with T.A.S. and too little time with her terminally ill mother.

“She said she would never get back the time he took from her — as she put it, her “whole high school career” — and that for two years after T.A.S. was arrested, she ignored everyone and stayed in her room by herself, replaying what had happened.”

The sexual activity was not toward the low end of the scale” and (the bus driver) was in a position of trust.