Thursday court date delayed for man charged in police sex sting

The seventh man charged with allegedly attempting to buy sex from a teen girl in a Vancouver police sting had his court date on Thursday held over for three weeks.

Like five other accused who had scheduled court appearance this week in Vancouver provincial court, Donald Hugh Schroeder, 56, didn’t show up in person.

Court agreed to give Schroeder’s lawyer more time to review the case against him. The other five men who had new court dates set were Nikolaos Dais, 58, a retired Little Flower Academy teacher, Jun Jie He, 57, Jim Malmros, 45, Mario Celo Amistad, and Mehran Arefi.

None of the men appeared in person. Instead, each had a legal representative appear before the judge on his behalf.

Defence lawyers requested deferrals to give them more time to go over the Crown’s case.

They will return to court later in February. They are charged with communicating for the purposes of obtaining the sexual services of a person under 18.

On Dec. 7, former Vision Vancouver school trustee Kenneth Joseph Clement pleaded not guilty to the same charge. He has a trial date set for three days beginning Oct. 29. Clement resigned from the board last summer for what he said were personal reasons. Court records allege the offence took place in June 2018.

The men were among the first seven charged in the sting last year that resulted in 47 arrests. The other 40 men arrested in the sting are expected to face the same charges, according to B.C. prosecutors.

Vancouver police officers posing as girls between 15 and 17 years old communicated online with the men, who agreed to meet the girls for specific sex acts in exchange for money. Police posted decoy ads for sex workers on escort websites and social media. When men responded, they were told the subject of the ad was a girl between the ages of 15 and 17.

“Once detectives established the age, a sex act and fees with the johns, the johns were directed to a hotel room,” Deputy Chief Const. Laurence Rankin told a news conference. “In the room, they found VPD detectives and uniformed officers instead of teenage girls.”

The 47 men were arrested over the course of nine nights between June and November 2018, with about 25 officers involved each night.

The minimum sentence for attempting to obtain the sexual services of a person under the age of 18 is six months.