BRANTFORD – A homeless, addicted drug dealer gave a judge here a snapshot of his time in jail as he was being sentenced recently.
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Travis K. McDonald, 41, had been in jail for almost nine months when he stood before Justice Colette Good and told her what he experienced behind bars.
“I’ve seen more drugs, money, people making music videos and buying take-out food than I ever seen on the street, and that’s the truth,” McDonald said, noting he had been “shipped all around Ontario” during his time in jail.
“And trying to fight being sober? It’s an every day battle. You guys don’t understand. It sucks.”
McDonald was arrested after being found asleep in a downtown Tim Hortons in Brantford.
When police found there was a bench warrant out for him for not showing up for court, so they took him into custody. A search of his fanny pack turned up more than 24 grams of fentanyl.
McDonald pleaded not guilty on the basis of three allegations that his charter rights had been breached by the officers because an offer for him to connect with a lawyer wasn’t offered for 10 minutes, an administrative form wasn’t promptly filed and his fanny pack shouldn’t have been searched once he was secured in a police cruiser.
Good disagreed with all three arguments, saying not filing the report was an oversight by a rookie officer, the 10-minute delay was entirely reasonable and the arresting officer made good arguments based on safety for searching the fanny pack.
She found McDonald guilty of possession of fentanyl for trafficking, saying while the man was hardly a “high-level drug trafficker,” the very nature of his drug of choice was extremely dangerous.
McDonald agreed with the judge.
“This addiction is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life,” he said. “What I’ve seen that fentanyl does and makes people do, it would never make me want to sell it. I was just supplying my own habit.”
McDonald’s defence lawyer, Victoria Strugurescu, said her client wasn’t a high-level trafficker but a homeless father of four with substance abuse issue.
“He was in treatment for alcohol before in Port Colborne, got out in the summer of ’23, relapsed and found himself homeless,” she said. “He started using fentanyl about six months before his arrest.”
But federal prosecutor Kevin McGilly said McDonald was a low-level career criminal with a four-page “unbroken” record over several decades. “He put the public at risk. Brantford has a huge drug problem and one of the highest overdose rates in the country. Fentanyl is killing people.”
The judge weighed the Crown’s request for five years against the defence request for three-and-a-half years and sentenced McDonald to four years in prison less six months of credit for his time in Ontario jails.
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