B.C. man gets four years for death of Mountie
COLWOOD, B.C. As a judge delivered a fouryear prison sentence to the drunk driver who killed Const. Sarah Beckett on Friday, her grieving relatives shook and wept, before handing a letter to Crown counsel expressing their outrage.
Provincial court Judge Ronald Lamperson acknowledged the sentence would seem inadequate to the many people on Vancouver Island who have been touched by the “tragic case.”
“Clearly there is no sentence I can impose that will bring Const. Beckett back or address the pain that her family and friends continue to suffer,” Lamperson told a packed courtroom near Victoria.
But he said he must be guided by prior decisions involving impaired driving causing death in sentencing Kenneth Fenton, 29, who has also been banned from driving or owning a weapon for 10 years.
Lamperson said to his knowledge, Beckett is the first police officer in B.C. to be killed by a drunk driver.
Beckett, a 32-year-old mother of two boys, had recently returned from maternity leave when she was killed in Langford, a suburb of Victoria, in April 2016.
Her husband, Brad Aschenbrenner, broke down in tears as the judge recounted the details of his wife’s death.
The court heard that Fenton was upset about a friend’s suicide and had been drinking heavily before he sped through a red light in his truck and slammed into Beckett’s cruiser.
Another officer who had tried to stop Fenton’s truck seconds earlier because his tail lights were out described the crash as an “explosion” with “glass and smoke and dust everywhere.”
The judge said a man who spoke with Fenton at the scene said he appeared “dazed and confused” and asked how the Mountie was doing. When the man replied that he thought she was dead, Fenton slumped over and began to cry.
Fenton was taken to hospital, where he refused to give a blood sample and denied he had been drinking or had an alcohol addiction. A search warrant was later obtained to seize blood samples, which showed .287 milligrams of alcohol in 100 millilitres of blood, more than three times the legal limit.
The court also heard Fenton had previous traffic convictions, including two 90-day driving bans for alcohol-related incidents in 2006 and 2010.
Fenton pleaded guilty in May to impaired driving causing death and dangerous driving causing death. He was handed a four-year and three-year term for each charge, respectively, and the judge ordered that the sentences be served concurrently.
Beckett’s family was unhappy with the sentence and handed a statement to prosecutors criticizing their performance, said Crown counsel Chandra Fisher outside court. Fisher refused to show the statement to the media.
Alisia Adams of the B.C. Prosecution Service said counsel had regularly met with Beckett’s family and heard their concerns.
“It’s clear that the family and the friends and the colleagues of Const. Beckett have experienced a profound loss. We recognize their pain,” she said.