Man sentenced in violent home invasion

Skylon Johnson “not yet a hardened criminal,” judge says

A 20-year-old man has been sentenced to five-and-a-half years for a “horrendous” northeast Hamilton home invasion that saw a family “callously and ruthlessly terrorized and brutalized,” said an Ontario Court judge.

Skylon Johnson, 20, pleaded guilty in September to 10 charges stemming from the May 9, 2017 home invasion on Holly Avenue in east Hamilton, where a couple, their teenaged son and two of his friends awoke to five armed and masked intruders looking for a safe with money from the family’s business. A 46-year-old man was shot in the abdomen and thrown down the stairs. He nearly died, court heard, and has lasting injuries. None of the victims can be identified because of a publication ban.

“By their collective acts, these five young men, without so much as a moment’s thought put (the man’s) life at risk, a life he very nearly lost and they permanently destroyed his physical well-being, and ... the emotional and psychological well-being of everyone who was in the house that day,” Justice George Gage said during sentencing in late September.

Johnson was not the gunman, but his participation was “complete and total,” Gage said, calling it the “highest order of seriousness ... just shy of murder.”

Johnson was 18 at the time of the home invasion and has been in custody since his arrest at the scene. Two others involved, including the suspected gunman, have never been caught.

Two teens, who can’t be identified under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, were convicted. The first was sentenced to 27 months plus nine months’ probation; the second to 30 months plus six months’ probation.

Johnson was given credit for two years and 30 days in pretrial custody, bringing the balance of his sentence to three years and five months. He was also ordered to submit DNA and banned from owning weapons for life.

Gage noted that Johnson’s time in the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre has been “sobering.” Court previously heard he’d been assaulted and was eager to turn his life around. Gage accepted his plea as a “genuine expression of remorse.”

Johnson’s father abandoned his family when he was three and he was often alone or having to care for his siblings. He was a promising athlete who had hoped to play university football before his arrest.

His mother and other family have supported him in court. One of his defence lawyers, Dean Collett, spent months speaking with Johnson and his family, watching him transform and work toward high school credits.

Johnson is “not yet a hardened criminal, not yet a person in whom there is no hope of redemption,” Gage said. Detention centres are notoriously overcrowded places where inmates are exposed to drugs and violence, he said.

In handing down his sentence — just above the five-year mandatory minimum — Gage said it was important to understand that Johnson will one day be out of prison and his sentence shouldn’t be so crushing as to lose hope of rehabilitation.

“If Skylon Johnson emerges from this sentence imposed today more hardened, more brutalized, more damaged and more alienated than he is today, than when he went into custody, then the sentence imposed will have failed society and more importantly will have failed (the victim) and his family.”