SASKATOON, Sask. — A Saskatoon man with a lengthy history of voyeurism convictions is on trial for breaching release conditions by purchasing a cellphone capable of recording.
Kyle Ronald Hameluck, 37, was arrested on Feb. 14, hours after being released from the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre, when police found him with a Samsung cellphone at Midtown Plaza.
Four Saskatoon police officers took the stand Thursday, describing a surveillance operation that began the moment Hameluck left the Saskatoon Provincial Correctional Centre. Const. Adam Blades, of the Guns and Gangs Unit, was part of the five-officer team assigned to track him.
“We were following him to see if he was going to breach his release conditions,” testified Const. Blades.
Const. Bethany Ward recounted a day-long trail across the city. She watched Hameluck stop at the Mustard Seed, a Tim Hortons and a U-Haul location before he arrived at Midtown Plaza. There, officers say, he approached a kiosk, exchanged a few words with a clerk and walked away with a Samsung cellphone.
Const. Ward conducted foot surveillance inside the mall. She located Hameluck in the food court near an escalator. Two uniformed patrol officers moved in and arrested him at the bottom of the escalator.
Body-worn camera footage from both arresting officers was played in court.
Police seized a Samsung cellphone, its box, charger and receipt, along with two razor blades and a folded piece of paper with a photo of an unidentified woman. Officers testified the phone had a working camera.
Hameluck takes the stand
Hameluck, who pleaded not guilty, offered a different account.
He told the court he had nowhere to live after his release and planned to stay at two Saskatoon shelters. Two women from the John Howard Society picked him up from the correctional centre and drove him around.
He said he first went to Tim Hortons and then the Mustard Seed, to ask whether a bed was available. Told to come back later, he tried the Salvation Army, where staff advised him to return shortly before 3 p.m. to find out whether a bed was available.
In between, he picked up a storage unit key left in a mailbox by the mother of a friend and moved boxes of his belongings from the correctional centre into a U-Haul storage locker. He also met a friend who had been managing his finances while he was incarcerated. That friend handed him roughly $2,100 in cash, he testified.
Hameluck said he had previously been under a condition prohibiting him from possessing a cellphone equpped with a camera. But he said his previous probation officer told him he could destroy the camera with a razor blade, and that he had done so twice before while on probation.
On this day, he said he bought razor blades at Dollarama and went to a washroom to scratch out the camera lens. The glass was too hard. He then bought super glue at Dollarama, hoping to cloud the camera and make it unusable. He was arrested near the bottom of an escalator before he could apply it.
Trial adjourned
Crown prosecutor Christy Pannell requested a continuation to consider her cross-examination of Hameluck and whether a rebuttal witness would be required. Defence lawyer Patrick McDougall proposed the trial be scheduled for another full day.
Judge Darren Howarth adjourned the matter until Sept. 16 to set a continuation date. Hameluck was remanded in custody, with consent of both the Crown and defence.
In February, ahead of his release, Saskatoon police issued a public safety advisory, releasing his photo and warning that he had been convicted in 70 incidents involving voyeurism, indecent acts and trespassing at night, and that he posed a high risk to reoffend.
ljoy@sasktoday.ca
