Man who gave wife noxious substance to have sentencing hearing in December
The sentencing hearing for a man who was found to have given his wife an unauthorized medication while she was in hospital has been scheduled for December.
Mark Rumboldt was back in Newfoundland Supreme Court in St. John’s Tuesday, along with his lawyer Jeff Brace.
Brace requested that a pre-sentence report be prepared for Rumboldt’s sentencing hearing. Since a report usually takes between six and eight weeks to complete, Brace and Crown prosecutor Scott Hurley agreed to schedule the hearing for Dec. 19.
On Saturday, after two weeks of testimony and less than a day of deliberations, a jury found the 58-year-old Rumboldt guilty of administering a noxious substance, but not guilty of attempted murder.
The maximum sentence is 14 years, but Hurley had indicated he wouldn’t seek the maximum.
The charges stem from an incident on Jan. 22, 2016 at the couple’s home, after which both ended up in hospital.
The complainant had testified at the trial that she and Rumboldt had been
having trouble in their 25-year marriage and had been seeing a counsellor for about three months. That night, the couple had decided to have a quiet night at home with homemade pizza and some drinks, she said. The woman told the court Rumboldt had poured her two glasses of wine and ran her a bath. While she was in the tub, she said, he came into the bathroom and collapsed on the floor.
She called 911, and when police officers and paramedics arrived, they found both she and Rumboldt were extremely intoxicated.
Rumboldt had been discharged from hospital before his wife and sat by her bedside. At one point, a nurse checked on the woman and saw Rumboldt holding a facecloth to his wife’s mouth. When the cloth was moved, the nurse noted a white residue and what appeared to be pieces of pills in the woman’s mouth. It was later found to be Ativan, a sleeping pill. A pill bottle belonging to Rumboldt was found on her bed, and a bag containing more medications prescribed to him was found underneath her blanket.
The woman was also found to have high levels of Ativan in her blood.