Shooting victim accepts assailant’s likely sentence
Bike shop owner nearly bled to death on sidewalk after point-blank attack
Vancouver bike shop owner Paul Dragan is pleased that the Crown and defence are seeking an 18-year jail term for the former employee who shot him.
Dragan was commenting outside court following a two-day sentencing hearing for Gerald Battersby, who pleaded guilty to three counts of attempted murder and two firearms offences in connection with the June 2014 shooting.
Crown counsel and the defence made the joint submission before B.C. Supreme Court Justice Bruce Butler seeking the 18-year jail sentence, to be reduced to 141/2 years after Battersby is given credit for pre-sentence custody.
The judge said he would impose sentence on Oct. 21.
Talking to reporters following the hearing Friday, Dragan said he ultimately just wants justice for himself and his family and safety for the citizens of the country.
“I think what they proposed in terms of sentence, if acted upon, will provide that. I don’t know if I can ever be 100 per cent happy with any sentence unless it was life in prison forever.
“However that’s not the real world and this is the way the world works. In spending more time reliving it and thinking about it, I feel comfortable with it.”
Battersby admitted to shooting Dragan at point-blank range once in the chest as Dragan sat drinking a cup of coffee at a Starbucks across the street from one of his bike shops in Yaletown.
Dragan said in a victim-impact statement that he went into cardiac arrest and lost three quarters of his blood on the sidewalk and would have bled out had it not been for an off-duty emergency physician who acted quickly to help save his life.
In sentencing submissions, Crown counsel Hank Reiner told the judge that Battersby, 63, was engaged in a “rage-induced vendetta” that was fuelled by misplaced grievances and misdirected blame toward Dragan.
The bike store owner had allowed Battersby to move into a home he was renting in Vancouver before forcing him to move out following a dispute Battersby had with a friend of Dragan who was also living in the house.
Brock Martland, a lawyer for Battersby, told the judge that the events happened at a time of “enormous desperation” for his client.
Battersby was on the cusp of “exciting new things” in his life but things took a very serious turn after he was asked to leave the home and ended up on the streets and homeless, said Martland.
“This is a great part of what drove him to the edge,” he said.
After shooting Dragan, Battersby engaged in a shootout with two plainclothes police officers who just happened to arrive at the scene.
He fled east on a bike path to Science World, where he was involved in a second shootout with police before being shot himself.
Martland said that his client didn’t set out that day to go after police but that what happened at Science World was consistent with what is known as “suicide by cop” — where an individual wants to take his life by being killed by police.
The defence lawyer said his client was not mentally ill but was “certainly a man who made very poor judgments.”