Dangerous offender sentenced to more than a decade for sexual assault of teen girl
Dangerous offender sentenced to more than a decade for sexual assault of teen girl
A man guilty of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl was sentenced to more than a decade in prison Friday afternoon, nearly two and a half years after he was convicted.
Phillip Lionel Levac, 35, was convicted of two counts of sexual assault in June 2020.
Justice Graeme Mitchell sentenced Levac to 10 years in prison for the first offence and 14 years for the second offence. The sentences will be served concurrently.
Levac has spent most of his adult life in custody, according to Mitchell.
Factoring in his time already served in remand, Levac’s total sentence equals 10 years and three months, which will be served at a federal prison in British Columbia.
“The prospect of recidivism in Mr. Levac’s case is very high,” Mitchell said while reading his written decision out loud in court.
Levac committed two separate assaults against a girl who was 14 at the time. Both incidents took place at Levac’s Regina home in April 2018.
The victim, who is now 18, cannot be named due to a publication ban.
Levac was also charged with two counts of sexual interference stemming from the same incidents. However, those charges were stayed at the request of the crown.
Eleven witnesses testified during the trial, which began in December 2019.
Both the girl and Levac told court that they met in the weight room at the Fieldhouse and Lawson Aquatic Centre in April 2018. Levac agreed to be her trainer, but the relationship extended outside of the gym.
Evidence showed hundreds of messages were exchanged between the teenager and Levac leading up to the sexual assaults.
The teenager said she went to Levac’s house on two occasions to “hang out.” He sexually assaulted her both times.
In her victim impact statement, the teenager said she suffered from flashbacks and had difficulty sleeping long after the sexual assaults.
“I spent countless hours replaying the incidents in my head to see what I did wrong. I blamed myself for the longest time,” she said.
Although the victim has had time to heal, she said the incidents are still impacting her life.
“This might sound crazy but I forgive you,” she wrote in her statement.
“Not for you, but for myself, even though forgiving you is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do.”
Justice Mitchell considered the effects of the trauma aggravating factors when making his decision.
“It is apparent that (the victim) continues to suffer severe psychological trauma,” Mitchell said.
Another aggravating factor was Levac’s lengthy criminal record that dates back to 2002 and includes violent sexual assaults among other crimes.
Mitchell ruled Levac a dangerous offender in September 2022. Public safety was one of the reasons behind his lengthy sentence.
The crown sought a 20-year prison sentence for Levac, eight years for the first offence and 12 years for the second offence to be served one after the other.
The defence recommended a 10-year total sentence.
“It’s a significant sentence but not quite what we asked for,” said crown prosecutor Roger DeCorby.
“I think (the family is) mostly relieved that the trial was over, that the convictions were entered and I think they are trying to move on from the whole process.”
The sentencing decision comes two and a half years after Levac was convicted.
DeCorby said the sentencing process was delayed because Levac assaulted a fellow inmate in the provincial corrections centre. He was charged and convicted with aggravated assault before being sentenced on the sexual assault indictments.
Following Levac’s sentence, he will be placed under a 10-year long-term supervision order. He will also be registered as a sex offender for the rest of his life.
The Biden administration is moving forward with a plan to shoot down a large Chinese balloon suspected of conducting surveillance on the U.S. military, by bringing it down once it is above the Atlantic Ocean where the remnants could potentially be recovered, according to two U.S. officials.
A cold snap that triggered Environment Canada alerts involving eight provinces and territories extended into a second day on Saturday, shattering several past temperature records and leaving thousands of customers in Atlantic Canada without power.
Convicted murderer Daniel Jolivet, in prison for the past 30 years, has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested. W5 reviews the evidence he painstakingly assembled while behind bars. W5's documentary 'Buried Evidence' airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.
The massive white orb drifting across U.S. airspace has triggered a diplomatic maelstrom and is blowing up on social media. A look at what's known about the balloon crossing the U.S. and what isn't.
The oldest preserved vertebrate brain has been found in a 319-million-year-old fossilized fish skull that was removed from an English coal mine over a century ago.
WINNIPEG -- An Indigenous organization is spearheading efforts to develop a system that could make it easier to flag when a person experiencing homelessness is missing.
Winnipeg police released a new image of a 31-year-old woman who has been missing since early last year on Friday in the hope it may generate new information on her whereabouts.
Alberta's high court is being asked to overturn a review board decision relating to the stabbing deaths of five young people at a Calgary house party on the grounds the former provincial justice minister interfered.
A spokesperson for the Law Society of Ontario (LSO) says Metrolinx began cutting down historic trees at Osgoode Hall in Toronto on Saturday before the Ontario Superior Court could hear an injunction to prevent their clearing.
Joey Votto has been coming to the Annex Chess Club (ACC), just north of Bathurst and Bloor streets, every week for a few months now, according to Supol.
A man who took part in four traffic-stopping protests in Metro Vancouver in an effort to save old-growth forests has been given a conditional sentence and six months' probation by a provincial court judge.
Residents from Quebec to Newfoundland and Labrador are waking up this morning to more extreme cold weather. Emergency officials warned people to seek shelter and monitor for frostbite if they had to be outside overnight, as the temperature across much of Eastern Canada was expected to feel like -40 C to -50 C with the wind chill.
Another property reportedly belonging to a family member of Tony Accurso was the target of an arson attack in Laval early Saturday morning. The Laval fire department responded to a call at 3:22 a.m. about a fire at the building located at 1410 Jaffa Street in the Saint Rose district in the northern part of Laval.
A Quebec university study found that nearly three years of the pandemic have had an effect on the travel habits of Quebecers: even with the partial or complete lifting of restrictions, they increasingly prefer to travel at home. The most recent Cahier des tendances published by the Transat Chair in Tourism at the École des sciences de la gestion de l'UQAM revealed that inflation and health measures hurt many Quebecers.
The first North Atlantic right whale to be entangled in connection to Canada’s lobster fishery in over five years has been successfully rescued by marine mammal rescue responders in the United States.
An investigation that lasted almost two years has resulted in moose hunting violation convictions for six people and a lodge in Red Lake in northwestern Ontario.
Convicted murderer Daniel Jolivet, in prison for the past 30 years, has maintained his innocence since the day he was arrested. W5 reviews the evidence he painstakingly assembled while behind bars. W5's documentary 'Buried Evidence' airs Saturday at 7 p.m. on CTV.
The owner of Radical Gardens, a restaurant in Timmins said she's experienced nineteen robberies over the last eight years; with the most recent one taking place in the early morning hours Friday.
