A Midland man who was acquitted of second-degree murder in the death of his tenant has pleaded guilty to a gun charge and been sentenced to time served.
Rick Patrick, 69, was sentenced on Thursday by Superior Court Justice Clyde King, the same judge who presided over his November murder trial.
“You’ve been very fair. I’ll accept whatever (sentence),” Patrick said in his remarks addressed to the judge.
In reply, King downplayed his own treatment of Patrick, telling the retired Midland man that he had only the jury that acquitted him in the death of Christopher Forrester to thank.
However, King made it plain in his general remarks that the verdict in the murder trial was a reasonable outcome. Unfortunately for Patrick, while praising him for his conduct during his legal saga, King said his storage and keeping of the weapon was unacceptable.
“I can only imagine if a young person got a hold of a loaded handgun,” said King.
Due to weather, proceedings were held by video but in the same courtroom where a jury returned the not-guilty verdict in the stabbing death of Forrester, an Orillia-area native who was living at Midland a property owned by Patrick.
The guilty plea ends a case that stretched more than three years and left two families shattered.
It also offered an insight into the troubled life of the victim, who struggled with mental health issues, the lack of community supports for people suffering, along with a concerning glimpse into the glacial pace of the Landlord and Tenant Board in Ontario.
Patrick claimed self-defence, saying he was attacked in his driveway late at night nine days before Christmas in 2021, after more than a year of being harassed by a friend-turned-bad-tenant.
In a tragic twist, court heard testimony during the trial that the knife that killed Forrester was gifted to Patrick by Forrester two years earlier as a Christmas present.
The gun that prompted the guilty plea on Thursday was not involved in the killing of Forrester. Police only found the gun after executing a search warrant three days later. The weapon was found at the foot of Patrick’s bed, stored improperly in a mobile filing case, court heard.
On Thursday, Patrick’s lawyer, Alison Craig, said her client was merely holding on to the weapon with the intention of sending it to Midland’s Royal Canadian Legion. It had originally been owned by a Second World War veteran who had died.
Time served was in lieu of the 40 days Patrick had spent in pre-trial custody before being released in January 2022 on strict conditions to await trial on the second-degree murder charge. The Crown had asked for time served as well but wanted the sentence entered into the record as a one-year sentence.
The defence had asked for an absolute discharge, citing what Patrick had been through living under house-arrest conditions while awaiting trial.
At trial, court heard testimony that the men had a shared love of homegrown cannabis and that original bond was something of a mentor-protege relationship. That all changed when Forrester stopped paying rent and began to display increasingly bizarre behaviour.
Not long after arranging for a Christmas dinner with his mother on the phone, Forrester inexplicably headed over to Patrick’s house, a short distance away, on foot on the evening of Dec. 19, 2021. He lay in wait at the end of Patrick’s driveway for him to return home.
Patrick arrived just past 10 p.m. and a confrontation followed where Forrester was stabbed once.
Rushed to hospital, the 35-year-old died less than an hour later.
Crown attorney Dennis Chronopoulos, who also prosecuted Patrick on the gun charge, had a difficult case to prove murder. Virtually every witness the Crown called also offered evidence of Forrester’s erratic behaviour.
Perhaps just as telling was the evidence offered about how powerless the Landlord and Tennant Board was to intercede in disputes that had gotten out of hand.
Patrick had made attempts to evict Forrester, but because of a combination of his family coming through with back-rent at the last moment and the general delay it took to get a substantive judgment, the dispute lingered.
The two men were due to have a hearing in Barrie about a month after Forrester’s death.
