Ex-U.K. soldier sentenced to prison for ‘vicious assault' that killed Winnipeg man in Toronto bar
'This was a vicious assault with tragic consequences,' Superior Court Justice Katherine Corrick said during sentencing in a downtown Toronto courtroom.
Craig Gibson, 30, was taken into custody late last month. He showed no emotion as he stood up with his arms outstretched, waiting to be handcuffed and taken back to prison.
MIKAELA MACKENZIE / FREE PRESS FILES
Brett Sheffield
On Aug. 28, 2023, Gibson, then a corporal with the British Armed Forces, had just completed a reconnaissance competition in Thunder Bay and was in Toronto on his way home to England. Brett Sheffield, 38, and some of his employees from Pilot Mound-based NextGen Drainage Solutions,were in Toronto on a business trip.
Both men and their friends went to Locals Only Bar on King Street West that night. Surveillance footage showed the two groups interacting good-naturedly with each other while consuming copious amounts of alcohol. A disagreement arose, however, and after heated words, Gibson elbowed Sheffield three times in the head.
Officers responded to the incident at 11:25 p.m. that night and 'life-saving measures were commenced on scene,' but the victim died two days later in hospital, the Toronto Police Service said at the time.
A Toronto jury convicted Gibson of manslaughter in December, rejecting his testimony that he was acting in self-defence because he believed Sheffield was carrying a knife.
The judge said Tuesday that what happened that evening was not 'a one-punch manslaughter,' nor a bar fight. Gibson struck Sheffield 'without warning' and had to be pulled away by others.
She called Gibson 'a strong and powerful man.' He testified he grew up in a rough part of Scotland 'where you did not make it through school if you did not know how to handle yourself. And he knew how to handle himself.'
He had been living in England with his fiancée and infant daughter while on bail. When he was 21, Gibson joined the British army and served in Iraq, Afghanistan, Ukraine and Kosovo.
While Gibson was dishonourably discharged, his British Army superiors submitted letters of support to the court.
They described him as a disciplined, dependable soldier who has acted as an instructor and mentor to junior colleagues. As a result of the conviction and sentence, he has lost any chance of realizing his lifelong goal of serving as a member of the SAS, an elite special forces unit in the British army.
There is no minimum sentence for manslaughter, and the maximum is life imprisonment.
Prosecutors had asked for a six-and-a-half-year sentence. Defence lawyers recommended a sentence of between two and three years.
Wednesdays
A weekly dispatch from the head of the Free Press newsroom.
Corrick also addressed the impact Sheffield's death has had on his loved ones, 'who continue to struggle with profound grief and the immense hole that's been left in their lives.'
During the sentencing hearing last month, Sheffield was described in victim impact statements as a successful entrepreneur who was gentle, compassionate and generous, the kind of person who would take a homeless man to a restaurant and buy him coffee and pie.
His 96-year-old grandmother wrote the family 'will never get over his tragic, cruel, unnecessary death.'
Sheffield's fiancée wrote that not only has she lost her best friend, lover and confidant, but her two children have been robbed of their hero.
— Toronto Star
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Winnipeg Free Press
9 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Judge tells 92-year-old he will die in prison after conviction in UK's oldest solved cold case
LONDON (AP) — For more than a half-century, Ryland Headley got away with murder. When justice finally caught up to the former railway worker Tuesday in a British courtroom, he was 92 years old and using hearing aids to listen to his fate. A judge sentenced Headley to life in prison for the rape and murder of Louisa Dunne, a 75-year-old widow and grandmother who was strangled in her home in western England in 1967. It is believed to be the longest time in the U.K. between crime and conviction. 'The violation of her home, her body and, ultimately, her life was a pitiless and cruel act by a depraved man,' Justice Derek Sweeting said in Bristol Crown Court. Headley broke into Dunne's home through a window and left a palm print on the glass. Police took the hand prints of 19,000 men and boys in the area to try to solve the crime, but did not find a match at the time. Headley moved out of the area and went on to rape two older women in similar circumstances in the late 1970s and serve time in prison. But his DNA was not collected until an unrelated arrest in 2012. Last year, semen found on the blue skirt that Dunne had been wearing when she was killed was found to match Headley's DNA. His palm print was found to match the one on her window. At his trial, prosecutors had read testimony from the victims of his previous rape convictions, providing jurors with an insight into what happened when he broke into Dunne's home, said Det. Insp. Dave Marchant. 'Hearing the voices of the victims of his 1977 offenses, is just incredibly powerful and harrowing,' Marchant said. Dunne's granddaughter, Mary Dainton, who is now about the age her grandmother was when she was killed, said she had been stunned to learn of Headley's arrest in November. 'I accepted that some murders just never get solved and some people have to live with that emptiness and sadness,' she said. On Tuesday, Dainton told the court that her grandmother's murder and rape had cast a cloud over the rest of her mother's life. 'The fact the offender wasn't caught caused my mother to become and remain very ill,' she said. 'It saddens me deeply that all the people who knew and loved Louisa are not here to see that justice is being done.' Sweeting said that by escaping punishment for so long, Headley had compounded the suffering of Dunne's family. He told Headley he had to serve a minimum of 20 years in prison and would normally spend time explaining the effect of such a term. But he was blunt in this case. 'You'll never be released and you will die in prison,' Sweeting said.
Toronto Star
9 hours ago
- Toronto Star
Judge tells 92-year-old he will die in prison after conviction in UK's oldest solved cold case
LONDON (AP) — For more than a half-century, Ryland Headley got away with murder. When justice finally caught up to the former railway worker Tuesday in a British courtroom, he was 92 years old and using hearing aids to listen to his fate. A judge sentenced Headley to life in prison for the rape and murder of Louisa Dunne, a 75-year-old widow and grandmother who was strangled in her home in western England in 1967. It is believed to be the longest time in the U.K. between crime and conviction.
Winnipeg Free Press
11 hours ago
- Winnipeg Free Press
Takeaways from AP's report on Attorney General Bondi's comments about evidence in Epstein case
WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Pam Bondi's recent comments about evidence the Justice Department is reviewing from its Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking investigation has fueled anticipation about the expected release of more files related to the wealthy financier. But weeks after Bondi's claim about 'tens of thousands' of Epstein videos in the government's possession, it remains unclear what she was referring to. Here's a look at some of the takeaways from an Associated Press report about the Epstein case and Bondi's recent remarks: Who are Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell? A New York financier with ties to politicians and other famous and powerful people, Epstein was arrested in 2019 as he arrived in the U.S. from Paris aboard his private jet and charged with sexually abusing dozens of teenage girls during the early 2000s. The case was brought more than a decade after a secret plea deal with federal prosecutors in Florida disposed of nearly identical allegations. Weeks after his arrest, Epstein took his own life inside a high-security unit at a New York jail. Since then, Epstein's crimes, high-profile connections and death have made him a subject of public fascination, intense media scrutiny and conspiracy theories. Maxwell, Epstein's British socialite girlfriend, was separately charged and later convicted of helping Epstein sexually abuse underage girls. Many of the scores of women who accused Epstein of abusing them have characterized Maxwell as the madam who recruited them. Maxwell, who laid blame for the abuse on Epstein, was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in prison. A hidden camera and reporters at the White House Bondi first mentioned the videos in April when she was approached in a restaurant by a woman with a hidden camera who asked about the status of the release of the Epstein files. Bondi replied there were tens of thousands of videos 'and it's all with little kids so they have to go through every one,' referring to the FBI. Then in May, after conservative activist James O'Keefe — who obtained and later publicized the hidden camera video — alerted the Justice Department press office to the encounter, Bondi appeared at the White House, where she said: 'There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn.' The comments tapped into long-held suspicions and theories that, despite the release over the years of thousands of records documenting his activities, embarrassing and incriminating details about him or other powerful figures remain suppressed by the government. Her statements appeared meant to explain the delay in releasing more files, even though the government would presumably never release footage depicting children. What the AP found through its reporting The Associated Press spoke with lawyers and law enforcement officials in criminal and civil cases concerning Epstein and Maxwell who said they had not seen and did not know of a trove of recordings like what Bondi described. Indictments and detention memos in the cases do not reference sexually suggestive videos, and neither was charged with possession of child sexual abuse material even though that offense would have been easier for prosecutors to prove than the sex trafficking counts they faced. An AP review of hundreds of court documents in the case found non-specific mentions of the existence of video evidence but no references to tens of thousands of recordings showing Epstein with children or child sex abuse material. FBI Director Kash Patel, who has refuted conspiracy theories that Epstein was murdered, did not advance the suggestion of thousands of recordings with Epstein during a recent interview on Joe Rogan's podcast. Though not asked explicitly about Bondi's comments, he dismissed the possibility of incriminating videos involving powerful Epstein friends, saying 'If there was a video of some guy or gal committing felonies on an island and I'm in charge, don't you think you'd see it?' Asked whether the narrative 'might not be accurate that there's video of these guys doing this,' Patel replied, 'Exactly.' One potential clue, however, may lie in a little-noticed 2023 court filing — among the documents the AP reviewed — in which Epstein's estate was revealed to have located an unspecified number of videos and photos that it said might contain child sex abuse material. Even that remains shrouded in secrecy with lawyers involved in that civil case saying they are bound by a protective order and cannot discuss it. The judge ordered representatives of Epstein's estate to review the content before handing anything over to the lawyers and alert the FBI if the estate found anything that could be considered child sexual abuse imagery. The department declined repeated requests from the AP to speak with officials overseeing the Epstein review. What are the stakes for Bondi? Bondi's statements matter because she's already facing intense pressure from conservatives to prove the government has in its possession previously unseen compelling evidence after an earlier document dump she hyped failed to satisfy online sleuths, conspiracy theorists and members of President Donald Trump's base. During a Fox News Channel interview in February, Bondi said an alleged Epstein 'client list' was sitting on her desk for review. The next day, the Justice Department distributed binders marked 'declassified' to far-right influencers at the White House, but it later became clear much of the information had been in the public domain for years. No 'client list' was disclosed, and there's no evidence such a document exists. The flop left conservatives fuming and did little to tamp down conspiracy theories that for years have spiraled around the financier's case thanks to his ties to politicians and other famous and powerful people. Right wing-personality Laura Loomer called on Bondi to resign, branding her a 'total liar,' while conservative legal group Judicial Watch sued the Justice Department to try to obtain more Epstein records. Afterward, Bondi said a 'source' in the FBI's New York field office informed her that thousands of pages of previously undisclosed documents exist and ordered the bureau to provide the 'full and complete Epstein files,' including all 'records, documents, audio and video recordings, and materials' concerning Epstein and his clients. Employees have logged hours reviewing records to prepare them for release. It's unclear when that might happen.
