Ex-firefighter convicted in theft from dead woman’s suite loses Supreme Court appeal

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This article was published 14/01/2019 (1927 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A former Winnipeg firefighter convicted of stealing from a dead woman’s apartment has lost his appeal at Canada’s highest court.

The Supreme Court of Canada dismissed Darren Fedyck’s appeal Tuesday, siding with the majority of Manitoba’s Court of Appeal to uphold his conviction for theft under $5,000. Fedyck was convicted in 2017 of stealing gold jewelry and hundreds of dollars in cash from a dead woman’s apartment while he was on duty as a city firefighter.

Fedyck’s defence lawyer, Sarah Inness, argued at the Supreme Court that the prosecution’s case against him, and the trial judge’s finding of guilt, were all based on inferences instead of facts. The panel of Supreme Court justices had to decide whether Manitoba provincial court Judge Kael McKenzie made legal errors in his 2017 decision to convict Fedyck.

“Purely circumstantial cases increase the risk of a miscarriage of justice and a wrongful conviction,” Inness argued Tuesday, emphasizing that no one saw Fedyck steal and no one could say for certain whether anything was missing from the deceased woman’s apartment. Fedyck told his co-workers the cash wasn’t stolen and the jewelry belonged to him. She questioned why the Crown hadn’t tried to obtain Fedyck’s bank records to prove its case and suggested the burden of proof in the case was “shifting” from the Crown to the accused.

Crown attorney Jennifer Mann told the Supreme Court justices the prosecution didn’t know which bank Fedyck used, and they would have had to request records from every financial institution in Winnipeg to try to prove he didn’t take the cash out of a bank machine or ATM, as he claimed.

“Proving a negative, in these circumstances, quite frankly is impossible,” Mann said during the hearing, a webcast of which was reviewed by the Free Press.

“The appellant’s banking records were entirely within his control. Surely he would have produced these records that would, if he is correct, have fully exonerated him. They would have ended the prosecution.”

Justice Michael Moldaver seemed to agree.

“If he took the money out of the bank that day or the day before, the simplest thing to do is just go and get a receipt, show the money being taken out of the bank, show it to the police, and none of us is sitting here now,” he said.

“That’s what defies logic. So when the trial judge is looking at this explanation, it’s totally open to him to reject it as being completely unreasonable.”

Fedyck lost his job with the Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service after he was criminally charged following his co-workers’ accusations that he’d stolen cash and jewelry from a 76-year-old woman who had died in her Henderson Highway apartment.

Fedyck was on duty with the crew from Fire Station 16 in October 2015 when they were called out to check on the woman’s well-being because of a foul smell reported in the seniors’ building. His co-workers got suspicious when Fedyck volunteered to go back into the building alone to retrieve the woman’s health card, and they later searched his belongings to find two gold necklaces and between $800 and $1,000 in cash, although they initially told police the items had simply fallen out of Fedyck’s pocket.

He was convicted and sentenced to six months in jail, but he appealed the conviction last year at Manitoba’s Court of Appeal, which upheld his conviction 2-1. Because the decision wasn’t unanimous, he was allowed to take his case to the high court in Ottawa. He remained free on bail, pending the Supreme Court’s decision.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @thatkatiemay