Man beaten in jail loses bid to get Red Scorpion records for lawsuit

A man who was severely beaten while being held in the Surrey pretrial jail in 2011 has lost a bid to get records about how Red Scorpion gangsters were managed by prison staff before he was attacked.

Allen Douglas Ogonoski is suing the B.C. government for a traumatic brain injury he suffered Aug. 15, 2011, alleging he “was intentionally assaulted and battered” by a prisoner with connections to the Red Scorpion gang.

His lawyers applied in B.C. Supreme Court to get documents “relating to the management of the Red Scorpion gang within the Surrey Pretrial Services Centre” that were filed when gang leader Jamie Bacon sued the government in 2009 for being held in solitary confinement for several months.

Ogonoski’s legal team also wanted to use transcripts it had obtained in a separate prison-beating suit to aid in his case against the government.

But Supreme Court Master Leslie Muir denied both applications in a written ruling released Thursday. Muir said the issues raised in Bacon’s suit “are quite different from the matters at issue in this action.”

Government affidavits filed in Bacon’s case “deal with why Mr. Bacon was being kept in segregation,” Muir noted. “They made reference to the dangers the police thought he might post to witnesses to the events that led to his charges and to the fact that there was credible intelligence that several ‘hits’ had been ordered on Mr. Bacon.”

Muir said there was a “peripheral reference to the interactions of rival gang members and the need to segregate them from one another, but it is clearly an aside or casual reference in some of the emails that are directed to the first two issues.”

She said the documents in the other prison-beating lawsuit, filed by Independent Soldier gangster Jesse Margison, are not relevant to Ogonoski’s case.

Margison suffered permanent brain damage when his head was stomped on at North Fraser Pretrial jail in 2011.

“The cases are factually distinct. The assaults occurred in different institutions. The attack on Mr. Margison is said to have been a targeted hit, as opposed to an incompatibility,” Muir said. “I am not satisfied that the plaintiff has made out a case for production of the transcripts from the Margison action, and the application is denied.”

Ogonoski’s civil lawsuit is due to go to trial in January. His suit says the government was negligent by placing him in a jail cell with Red Scorpion associate Christopher Fulmer, who attacked him.

The government was also negligent for transferring Fulmer from a gang unit to Ogonoski’s floor in Surrey pretrial and for “failing to evaluate and screen Mr. Fulmer for a history of violence, muscling and incompatibility with Mr. Ogonoski knowing that Mr. Ogonoski was incompatible with Red Scorpion Gang members and associates,” his suit alleges.

The government denies any liability for what happened.

“The province says that it had in place and complied in all aspects with the applicable policies, procedures, standards and legislation,” Muir noted.