Estevan teacher gets five years for sex crimes

REGINA Posing online as a female from Minot, an Estevan teacher set out to target and lure students.

On Monday, that teacher, 42-year-old Troy Ruzicka, received a five-year prison sentence for sex offences committed against three teenage girls.

“These are very serious crimes...,” observed provincial court Judge Lane Wiegers in agreeing to impose the sentence jointly recommended by Crown and defence counsel. “You had told the author of the pre-sentence report that you chose to contact the victims because of what you had heard about them from other students, the way they dressed and research that you had done on Facebook. And, you know, this is very telling.”

The judge noted Ruzicka’s plan was to “obtain sexual gratification through the victims, knowing they were students, knowing their ages, having identified them presumably because you thought they were vulnerable to this type of suggestion.”

“And then you sought to exploit them,” he said.

Crown prosecutor David Zeggelaar described to the court a set of circumstances that first came to light in February, when a complaint was made regarding Facebook messages between Ruzicka and a female student.

The resulting police investigation uncovered a situation that beyond messaging and dated back to March 2014, when Ruzicka started a Facebook account posing as a Minot-based restaurant employee named Nikki Stettler.

Court heard Ruzicka, through that account, began sexually charged online exchanges with female students at his school, Estevan Comprehensive School. “Nikki” claimed to know Ruzicka, and encouraged the students to make direct contact with him.

While the Nikki Stettler account had been the subject of complaints by students as early as October 2014, it wasn’t concretely connected with Ruzicka until early 2017.

Zeggelaar noted it became apparent Ruzicka was in charge of the account when Ruzicka knew information passed on by students with access to the account, and when he was observed during classroom hours receiving and responding to messages involving that account.

Ruzicka pleaded guilty to seven charges, including two counts of sexual assault, three of luring, and one each of sexual exploitation and accessing child pornography.