Victims’ loss, inmate’s gains focus of faint hope hearing

REGINA — When the fireworks go off on Canada Day, Georgina Barlas’s thoughts will immediately go to her brother Frankie, the “easygoing,” “joker” of the family who was murdered 18 years ago on July 1.

Through tears, Georgina and her sister Crystal told a jury on Tuesday about the impact of their loss, during a ‘faint hope’ parole hearing for the man who killed their brother.

Lyle Bernard Bellegarde, 43, hopes to convince a jury to give him a shot at seeking parole sooner than the 25 years set by the life sentence he received in the same Regina courtroom in 1997, when he was convicted of first-degree murder.

Fotios Frank Barlas, partowner of the Indian Head restaurant Frankie and Johnny’s, was found facedown in a creek bed on the Little Black Bear First Nation on July 4, 1996. He had died from massive head injuries.

Among the considerations for the six-man, six-woman jury that will decide whether or not to reduce Bellegarde’s parole eligibility date, now set for 2021, are victim impact statements.

Georgina recalled watching her mother, a widow, “crumble” when she learned her only son had been killed. In their statements, both sisters and their mother said they are haunted by the suffering Barlas, 26 at the time of his death, must have endured. Bellegarde admitted

“HE WAS A PART OF ME, AND LYLE (BELLEGARDE) TOOK THAT PART

AWAY.” MOTHER OF FRANKIE

BARLAS

at his trial that he stomped his victim and hit him with a bottle and tire iron.

“He was a part of me, and Lyle took that part away,” Barlas’s mother wrote in a statement read by Georgina.

Both sisters lamented that their own children will never know their “uncle Frank” and think about “what could have been” — if he may have been a father himself one day.

The Barlas family wasn’t in court to hear how Bellegarde — a father of three children, including two born while he was in prison — has spent the past 18 years.

After successfully completing programs and serving several years with clean drug screens, Bellegarde was deemed a minimum security prisoner. From December 2011 to the present, he has been an inmate at the Willow Cree Healing Lodge near Duck Lake. Before that, he served in mediumsecurity prisons, including Bowden, where he married his longtime common-law spouse in 2006.

Correctional employee Tracey Robinson testified that private family visits or PFVs were very important to Bellegarde, as they are to all inmates, “to keep those family bonds alive and well.”

Robinson reviewed Bellegarde’s foot-high institutional file and composed a summary report for the court.

It shows that Bellegarde — who blamed the killing on his intoxication that night — continued to struggle with substance abuse behind prison walls, amassing seven institutional charges when drugs, mostly marijuana, were revealed in urine tests.

Once he had methadone in his system, and security reports speculated he may have bought and consumed vomit from an inmate who had a methadone prescription.

Since June 2008, Bellegarde’s drug tests have been clean. However, corrections staff were concerned as recently as this year that he wasn’t regularly attending AA meetings.

The hearing continues today.