A young man who fired a handgun on a busy downtown Windsor street, wounding a woman, has been handed a conditional sentence to be served from home.
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Alex Matti, 30, pleaded guilty last week before a judge in Superior Court of Justice to charges of aggravated assault with a firearm and unauthorized possession of a restricted firearm.
“I wish to apologize to the woman who I hurt through my reckless actions,” Matti said ahead of the judge accepting a joint sentencing submission by the prosecution and defence.
Matti, a London man, and a male companion were involved in a verbal and then physical confrontation with three other men on the street in front of a restaurant in the 200 block of Ouellette Avenue at about 2:15 a.m. on Sunday, July 17, 2022.
According to an agreed statement of facts, one of the other men struck Matti, who punched that individual in the face in return. A soda can was tossed at Matti. He and his companion began walking away but were followed.
That was when both men turned around, one reaching into his waistband, grabbing what was only believed to be a handgun. But Matti pulled out an actual firearm, a restricted Fabrique Nationale (FN) handgun, and fired a shot towards their pursuers.
The bullet ricocheted off the ground and struck an innocent passerby in the leg.
In a victim impact statement read out in court Jan. 20 after Matti entered guilty pleas, the young woman described “pain I’ll never forget” and said the incident has had a “profound impact on my life.” She had to take a “significant amount of time” off work, and the “physical and emotional trauma” remains. She has also developed “a huge fear whenever I’m around a large group of people.”
The night she was shot in downtown Windsor, “we were just trying to get some shawarma,” the woman said.
Even though the two men had felt threatened, assistant Crown attorney Iain Skelton told the court that Matti’s action “exceeded the bounds of reasonable self-defence.”
Justice Maria Carroccia said denunciation, as well as sending a message of deterrence to others, were “the most important considerations” in finding an appropriate sentence for Matti.
“There is absolutely no excuse for you to walk the streets of Windsor with a gun,” Carroccia said.
“This situation could have been much, much worse — it could have resulted in the death of another person.”
Mitigating factors included the offender’s guilty pleas and the length of time taken to get the matter to trial. A two-week jury trial had been scheduled for April.
Matti spent 139 days in pre-sentence custody following his arrest, for which the judge gave 209 days credit using a standard formula. The judge also acknowledged the offender’s previous 781 days spent under “very strict bail conditions without any breaches.”
The judge handed Matti a two-year conditional sentence, the first 18 months of which he’s confined to his home, with exceptions for work, medical emergencies, religious services and a four-hour period on Saturdays to attend to the “necessities of life.”
The first 12 months he’ll be equipped with a GPS monitoring device. The final six months of his sentence he’s subject to an overnight curfew from 8 p.m. to 6 a.m.
Following the conditional sentence, Matti remains on probation for three years. The judge also ordered him to provide a DNA sample for a police criminal database, and he was handed a 10-year firearms possession ban.
Matti was originally charged with attempted murder, a conviction for which would have carried a mandatory four-year prison term due to the firearm. That charge against Matti and co-accused Ahmed Al Shammari was dismissed at an earlier preliminary hearing stage.
The case against Al Shammari was concluded in December 2023 after he pleaded guilty to a count of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. He was sentenced to a 90-day jail term followed by 12 months probation.
Matti was arrested very shortly after the downtown shooting incident. Police investigators discovered the handgun in a back alley dumpster. The firearm’s magazine was found lodged in a street sewer grate.