No jail time for would-be Welland bomber

Dozens of people could have been killed after a 42-year-old man set a number of home-made bombs inside his Welland apartment last fall, the Welland fire chief said in court Wednesday.

“On that day, our crews entered that home in heavy smoke conditions banked to the floor, blindly crawling past these later discovered improvised explosive devices to search the apartment and begin knocking down the fire,” Chief Brian Kennedy said at the sentencing hearing of Jason Grant.

What crews with the Welland Fire Department found inside the Park Street residence on Oct. 16, 2016 were several man-made bombs and ammunition.

Despite the deliberately-set fire, which spread rapidly throughout the residence, the bombs failed to explode.

Kennedy called the scenario “a recipe for disaster that I have not seen in my 33 years on the department and hope to never do again in my final years of my career.”

The chief said Grant’s actions placed the lives of firefighters, police officers, paramedics and the crowd that had gathered at the scene at great risk.

“This response could have killed dozens,” he said.

If emergency crews had not responded so quickly to the fire call, Kennedy added “we would be having a totally different conversation today.”

At Grant’s sentencing hearing in an Ontario Court of Justice in Welland, assistant Crown attorney Tim Hill asked Judge Tory Colvin to consider imposing a sentence of two years on a charge of possession of an explosive device for the purpose of committing arson.

Lawyer Mark Evans argued a conditional sentence, to be served in the community and not behind bars, was a more appropriate disposition.

He said his client had been trying to get treatment for mental health issues for 10 years to no avail. Within days of the offence, Grant began receiving appropriate care and has shown “incredible progress” now that he is receiving the treatment he had been desperately seeking.

The Crown called the matter a paradox in that the treatment the man pursued for 10 years unsuccessfully was suddenly made available to him after he committed a crime. The judge agreed. “It’s a sad fact that to get to the front of the line when dealing with mental illness, we need an incident such as this,” Colvin said.

The judge described Grant as a man who had “lived in his own private hell” for a decade, his name on a waiting list for mental health services.

The judge said the defendant is no longer a danger society now that he is receiving proper treatment and support and ruled an 18-month conditional sentence, followed by probation for three years, was the most appropriate disposition.

“Our prisons are not treatment centres,” he added. “Our prisons have little to no treatment options for mental illness.”

Grant apologized in court to the emergency services workers as well as his former neighbours.

“I am truly sorry for what I have done,” he said. “Not a day passes that I don’t feel horrible about the chaos I have caused. I’m not hiding behind my illness, I accept full responsibility for my behaviour and am living with the consequences of my actions.”

The fire chief, meanwhile, recalled watching a young family pull up in a mini-van to check out a home for sale on the street in the days following the fire.

“I will never forget the look of horror on the woman’s face as she walked up the sidewalk at the same time the Niagara Regional Police bomb unit was unloading their robot,” Kennedy said. “This is not the image we want to give our prospective residents, nor is it the image we want for future investors as this quickly became front page news across the province.”