Two men in U of T kidnapping sentenced
Judge says crime ‘corrodes our collective sense of safety’
The men behind the “meticulously planned” kidnapping of a University of Toronto student who was bound, blindfolded and held for ransom for 13 days before being rescued by Toronto police have each received double-digit prison sentences.
“Even when a victim is released unharmed, the psychological and emotional scars are slow to heal, if they ever do,” Superior Court Justice Maureen Forestell said Tuesday as she sentenced Kristopher Matthews to 15 years imprisonment for his role in the January 2020 abduction of Wenbo Jin. Matthews, who has a lengthy rap sheet, pleaded guilty to kidnapping and administering a stupefying substance relating to the sedatives he and Jevaughn Myers forced Jin to swallow after grabbing him from the bed of his downtown Toronto condo. Myers, a first-time offender, received a 10-year sentence.
Calling her role “minimal and peripheral,” a judge handed Stephanie Wiseman a 22-month conditional sentence and three years probation. Wiseman hung out and partied with her then-boyfriend, Martin Levy, at the Richmond Hill house where Jin was held, but had no participation in the actual kidnapping, Forestell said. She has also experienced a history of trauma.
A jury had earlier acquitted Levy of kidnapping.
The kidnappers demanded Jin’s father pay a ransom of 500 bitcoin, which was worth more than $5.5 million at the time. An extensive Toronto police investigation led to Jin’s dramatic rescue.
Earlier this month, Superior Court Justice Sean Dunphy sentenced Zeyu Zang, the “chief architect, investor, paymaster and directing mind of this scheme,” to 20 years in prison — believed to be one of the longest sentences that anybody in Ontario has ever received for a kidnapping.
Dunphy presided over a trial last fall that resulted in a jury convicting Zang of kidnapping and overcoming resistance to the commission of an offence.
The kidnapping of a stranger from his home for ransom has always been treated as one of the most serious crimes, Dunphy wrote in his sentencing reasons released March 6.
”It is the sort of crime that corrodes our collective sense of safety and security in a civil society.”
The evidence presented during the trial was replete with Zang’s “detailed instructions, written and oral,” to the team he recruited and directed, the judge wrote.
The judge said he took into account the degree of harm inflicted on the kidnapping victim, who was awakened in the middle of the night in his bed with what he believed was a gun pointed at him. (It was a replica.) “He was made to stand at the foot of his bed for several hours blindfolded and ordered to ingest unknown drugs that made him drowsy. He feared for his life at every moment.”
Jin was then forced into a hockey bag that was zipped up, leaving him feeling suffocated, and threatened with dire consequences should he resist. He was transported in a vehicle to a house in Richmond Hill and “was held in the dark, bound and blindfolded and in a constant state of terror for almost two weeks.”
Zang has been before the courts and police on a fairly steady basis, and “identity fraud and forgery of documents represent a consistent thread that can be followed through his prior record,” Dunphy wrote in his sentencing reasons. Those same “skills” also played a significant role in planning and carrying out the kidnapping, the judge added.
Born in China in 1986, Zang came to Canada on a student visa in 2009. After receiving a diploma in business operations in 2014, he did not return to China and has been subject to a deportation order since 2017, Dunphy’s ruling states.