Child victim, killer, now dangerous offender
Jeffrey Verdon now faces being imprisoned indefinitely
Jeffrey Verdon was once a victim.
At the age of four, he was thrown into the frigid Ottawa River with his 21/2-yearold brother Jason by a disturbed neighbour. Verdon was pulled out by a woman who heard his cry and saw him half in the water that day in February 1982. Jason’s body was found the next spring.
By his first year of adulthood, Verdon was a killer. At 18, the same age the man who killed his brother was at the time of the offence, Verdon stomped an Ottawa Citizen newspaper delivery man’s head in.
On Friday, Verdon, now 36, was saddled with another label: dangerous offender.
His life has been marked by violent outbursts, aggressive behaviour and a lengthy criminal record. But the designation itself, handed over by Ontario Court Justice Réginald Lévesque, comes specifically after Verdon blocked his landlady from leaving through a door and “placed his hand on her shoulder with sufficient downward force to cause pain for approximately three hours,” Lévesque wrote in a 74-page decision.
The same day, Nov. 4, 2011, Verdon slapped a repairman in the face, “banged his head more than 10 times against the door to the point of rendering him dizzy,” and threatened the lives of the man and his family.
A person is designated a dangerous offender if he “constitutes a threat to the life safety or physical or mental well-being of other persons.” The label means Verdon will now be imprisoned indefinitely. It has been applied to some of this country’s most notorious criminals, including Paul Bernardo, who raped, tortured and killed teenagers Kristen French and Leslie Mahaffy.
“The point here is that the accused is not being sentenced exclusively on the basis of the predicate offence, but more importantly on the combined basis of the predicate offence and increased importance of preventing the risk of dangers he represents based on pattern analysis,” Lévesque said in the decision.
“The accused comes with a long and serious violent criminal history and a long history of very limited motivation to address basic problems.”
Just before 2:30 a.m. on Aug. 24, 1995, Robert Savoie, 63, was at the tailgate of his pickup truck not far from Verdon’s apartment. Savoie was waiting for his drop-off of nearly 1,250 Citizen newspapers.
Verdon, drunk on bourbon and rum, and another teen approached the delivery man, saying they were looking for a ride. They weren’t. They wanted the car battery. The $55 in his pockets was just a bonus. Savoie begged them to stop. He suffered multiple bluntforce injuries to the head including skull fractures. There was bruising to his head, scalp, brain and scrotum, but not a single defensive injury.
In his ruling, the judge rehashed the details of Savoie’s death as one of 29 incidents in which Verdon couldn’t restrain himself. The incidents weren’t all as severe as Savoie’s homicide. Verdon resorted to fighting when a woman spilled a drink on his cousin in retaliation for having a drink spilled on her. He resisted arrest for violating his curfew and was pepper-sprayed by police. A woman said he threw a crystal ashtray at her because she wouldn’t stop smoking even though he told her it “stank.”
“He has a long history of being unsuccessful at risk management including parole violations, being unlawfully at large, reoffending violently while on parole, refusing to attend programs,” the judge wrote.
“Not only does he work against treatment as for example refusing anger management programming but also he misuses or does not follow the taking of prescribed medications.”
Verdon “seeks to avoid responsibility for his actions by blaming others and views others as having hostile intentions towards him.”
Lévesque refuted defence submissions that Verdon has not been severely violent since 2004 and that he has shown restraint since being incarcerated most recently, saying the evidence showed that simply wasn’t true.
The judge also denied a Charter application brought forward by defence lawyer Diane Condo that attempted to have the definition of “serious personal injury offence” in the Criminal Code declared unconstitutional.
As for Jason’s drowning, it’s not mentioned until the second-last page of Friday’s decision.
The judge said two psychiatrists, who testified that Verdon was a high risk to reoffend, said the incident wasn’t an issue that was related to the factors that were likely to cause Verdon’s criminal behaviour. In the days following the drowning, Verdon had helped police identify his brother’s killer, Jean Dionne, in a photo lineup. He had even retraced their steps to the river that day. The year after the drowning, Verdon’s father, Kim Fyke, killed himself in a suicidal depression.
In court Friday, Verdon was escorted into the glass prisoner’s box. He winked at his aunt, Corrine, and a younger woman seated next to her. Wearing a light grey shirt with his blond hair slicked back, Verdon listened to the judge, then furrowed his brow and began shaking his head, but stayed calm.