Zoldi pleads guilty in 2006 city shooting death
In the end, Richard Zoldi will probably serve as much prison time for manslaughter as he had been facing under a previous murder conviction.
Either way, Zoldi, 40, confessed this week in a Windsor courtroom that he was the gunman who pulled the trigger in the Aug. 27, 2006, shooting death of Troy Hutchinson near Ford Boulevard and Reginald Street in an east-end residential neighbourhood. Zoldi pleaded guilty to manslaughter on Wednesday. Superior Court Justice Marc Garson accepted a joint submission by the defence and prosecution that sees Zoldi serve the next nine months in custody followed by three years on probation. The judge gave him 14.5 years credit for time already served since his arrest shortly after the street shooting of Hutchinson — an act later described as the revenge slaying of a drug dealer following a botched robbery.
Neither family was represented in court as Zoldi, a father of four, apologized to the Hutchinson family, which lives in Jamaica. “He said that night ruined a lot of lives,” assistant Crown attorney George Spartinos told the Star.
His first trial ended in a mistrial in 2009 after it was discovered that police did background checks on prospective jurors. After a second trial, Zoldi was convicted in 2011 of second-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 13 years. That conviction was overturned by Ontario’s Court of Appeal last April and a third trial was ordered. Spartinos said that trial would likely have been scheduled for next year if Zoldi hadn’t pleaded out now.
After the initial trial — Zoldi and co-accused Shane Huard, both crack addicts, each faced murder charges — ended in a mistrial, the subsequent court proceedings were severed. Huard was convicted of first-degree murder in 2010 and sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years. His appeal was dismissed in 2013. Hutchinson, 28, was shot in the stomach at close range. As he fell to the ground, he called out: “Murder.” Zoldi has spent nearly his entire adult life either on probation or in custody, including for assault, resisting arrest, break and enter, robbery, theft and uttering forged documents.
On Remembrance Day in 1996, he took part in a home invasion of disabled Second World War veteran Archibald McKenzie, 84, and his live-in nurse, both of whom were bound, gagged and assaulted. Zoldi was sentenced to two years less a day in jail. McKenzie, a survivor of three years in prisoner-ofwar camps who was traumatized by the ordeal, died two months after the violent incident.