“Walter Gonzales” wasn’t who he said he was despite his City of Burnaby “Be Active Pass."
He was actually a defendant on the run from a 2013 sex-abuse and exploitation trial in Ontario.
The man calling himself Walter Gonzales worked at a Vancouver pool company and lived with a woman in the Lower Mainland for a year-and-a-half, according to a recent ruling by Ontario Superior Court Justice James Diamond.
The long arm of the law didn’t catch up with the man until he got into a fight with that woman over money in April 2015 and police were called.
When “Walter Gonzales” was arrested at his place of work that day, he was carrying a Burnaby Be Active Pass with his photo and alias on it, but a driver’s licence he was carrying in the name of Walter Justo Gonzales Parra had another man’s photo on it, and he couldn’t tell police the address on the ID when they asked him, according to the ruling.
Police discovered his true identity the following day: “Walter Gonzales” was really a man who had taken off in the middle of a jury trial in front of the Ontario Court of Appeal.
The 50-year-old man, who can only be identified as J.T. because of a publication ban protecting the identity of his victims, had successfully appealed his conviction on several offences relating to the sexual abuse and exploitation of his step-daughters, according to the ruling.
Out on bail, he had attended the first 12 days of a second trial before taking off to B.C., resulting in a hung jury.
Diamond noted all of J.T.’s victims had had to testify anew before he absconded.
A third trial after his arrest in B.C. ended in J.T. being convicted on three counts of sexual assault, three counts of sexual interference and two counts of sexual exploitation, resulting in a 16-year jail sentence and a deportation order to send him back to his native Peru.
Last month, Diamond sentenced J.T. to another 12 months in jail for failing to attend his 2013 trial.
“J.T. was given the privilege of being released on bail pending his second trial, and still wilfully breached those release terms by ceasing to attend his second trial and absconding to British Columbia,” Diamond wrote. “J.T. assumed a new identity, and a new life in British Columbia, presumably never looking back.”
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