A Vancouver provincial court judge said the increasing number of stranger assaults in the city has become tragic as she sentenced a man to six months in prison for one such incident.
“People are terrified,” Judge Ellen Gordon said in sentencing Ryan Egil Aitken to serve another 109 days on top of time already served after he pleaded guilty.
Aitken’s lawyer said he had assaulted the wrong stranger with a metal pipe.
“Tourists leave Vancouver with a very negative view of what has to be the most beautiful city in the world and it’s all because of offences like this,” Gordon said.
“I apologize to the victim,” Aitken said. “It was someone I thought it was and it wasn’t.”
The court docket shows a guilty plea to assault causing bodily harm. He was also charged with assault and making threats to cause bodily harm or death to a man who worked at the Flint Hotel on Powell Street in the Downtown Eastside. The incident took place Oct. 28, 2021.
Crown prosecutor Jeffrey LaPorte told Gordon police were called to an incident where a man was hit in the head with a metal pipe. The court heard a man was threatening the victim before swinging the pipe, which had a string attached to it.
“He was not unconscious but he was seeing white,” LaPorte said of the victim. “He ran away because the accused was chasing him.”
LaPorte said the victim saw the man who assaulted him being arrested.
“The accused has done this before,” LaPorte said, noting a 2019 conviction for attacking someone with a bamboo stick. Aitken received 45 days as a result, another case in which the victim did not know the assailant.
“Obviously, the accused has to be specifically dealt with,” LaPorte told Gordon. “He randomly attacks people with a weapon.”
As for the pipe attack victim, LaPorte said the man now has fears of being in the area where he tried to help people at the hotel.
Defence lawyer Samantha Purton said a female friend of Aitken’s had recently been sexually assaulted and Aitken thought the victim was the person involved.
“He thought he was attacking that person,” Purton said. “He feels great remorse about the harm he caused.”
Purton asked for time served in the offence.
Aitken must also serve 18 months of probation.
