Dangerous offender status to be sought for violent convict
Ronald Teneycke is a dangerous offender and should be locked up indefinitely, the Crown is expected to argue at a special hearing with dates yet to be determined. Crown counsel Kurt Froehlich told a provincial court judge Wednesday in Penticton that B.C.’s attorney general has agreed to allow his office to pursue the dangerous offender application.
Teneycke, who has a lengthy criminal record for drug, sex and violent offences, is currently behind bars after pleading guilty in April to shooting a man and holding up a store in Oliver.
Froehlich said outside court the Crown will pursue the special designation based partly of recent psychological assessments of on the results Teneycke.
Lawyers are due back in court Monday to begin the process of setting dates for the hearing. Froehlich said the matter will be decided in B.C. Supreme Court in Penticton, but was unsure how long it will take to get on the docket.
The last dangerous offender proceeding here was for David Bobbitt, who admitted to the gruesome sexual assault of a woman in his Penticton second-hand shop in 2011.
In that case, it took 14 months to get the hearing started after Bobbitt entered guilty pleas, and another nine months before a decision was rendered in March 2015 to keep Bobbitt behind bars indefinitely.
As with Bobbitt, the judge hearing Teneycke’s case will have the options of handing down a similar indefinite jail sentence, a definite jail term, or a definite jail term with long-term supervision order.
Teneycke’s four most recent offences — robbery, discharging a firearm with intent to wound, using a firearm to commit a robbery and flight from police — stem from a July 2015 crime spree in the Oliver area.
It began with him robbing the Eastside Grocery store at gunpoint, then shooting a man whose truck he stole on a forestry road outside the community. It ended when Teneycke crashed the stolen truck in a Cawston orchard and was arrested at gunpoint by police.
Teneycke’s criminal record dates back to 1981, but he gained notoriety in 2007 when police in the South Okanagan warned the public about his release from prison after completing a 12-year sentence for sexually assaulting a teenager and threatening to kill a correctional officer. He has been in and out of jail ever since.