Man gets probation after harassing cashier

After finishing a work shift in May 2021, a woman told her co-worker about her “stalker” as they walked to her car in the dark.

The man was waiting outside her car. After four years of harassment, it was the final straw.

“I do not know what he wants from me, and I hope I'll never find out,” the woman wrote in a victim impact statement read aloud by Crown prosecutor Ainsley Furlonger.

Donald Ralph Sly, 63, was a disgraced financial adviser who had recently served a two-year prison sentence for fraud when he began relentlessly pursuing the young cashier, showing up at her job and placing notes on her vehicle, a Saskatoon provincial courtroom heard last month.

He was sentenced to a probation period of two years after pleading guilty to criminal harassment.

Although the charge only pertained to the incident in 2021, the woman said the harassment began in 2017, when she was 16 years old.

The Starphoenix is withholding her name due to her age and the nature of the charge.

Court heard she was initially friendly to Sly because he was a customer, but she started feeling uncomfortable with how often he came to her till, only buying a few items.

She said things escalated when Sly, who was in his late fifties, asked her to meet him on a park bench outside her work. She declined.

She said she began hiding whenever he came to her workplace, and he gave her co-worker a letter to give to her.

She said she saw Sly at a bus stop around 2020-21, when she was 19.

Soon after, she got another note on her windshield after she left work, asking if she would like more notes at her home.

Sly followed up with a Facebook message.

Finally armed with his name, she gave his information to police, terrified that he knew the vehicle she drove and where she lived.

He was arrested after waiting for her in the dark.

Sly's lawyer, Tom Baldry, told court his client met the woman in 2017 and that he acknowledges what he did was wrong and constituted harassment.

Criminal harassment, which includes stalking, was added to the Criminal Code of Canada in 1993 as a specific response to violence against women.

The age difference between Sly and his victim is “weird” and this could never be a relationship, Judge Brent Klause noted.

“Please leave this young lady alone,” he added before accepting a joint submission from the Crown and defence.

Sly's probation conditions prohibit him from contacting the woman or being within a one-block radius of her home, work or school. He also must take any personal counselling as directed.