Woman freed from Fort Saskatchewan jail with fake papers nabbed in B.C.
A woman freed last month from Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre on fake paperwork has been collared, along with her boyfriend, by RCMP in British Columbia.
Mackenzie Dawn Hardy, 24, was released April 25 after the Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre, just north of Edmonton, was presented with fraudulent documents indicating the charges against her had been stayed.
Acting Alberta RCMP media relations manager Troy Savinkoff said in a Thursday news release that Hardy, along with David Joseph Wood, were spotted by a Revelstoke RCMP patrol officer on May 27. Revelstoke is about 700 km southwest of Edmonton.
Officers later contained an area where two people were seen near a stolen vehicle before Hardy and Wood were arrested.
Both Hardy and Wood have been taken before a Justice of the Peace and remanded into custody. The pair will be transported back to Alberta where they will be brought before the Alberta Courts regarding future court dates.
Hardy had been in Fort Saskatchewan jail facing a number of charges from Red Deer RCMP, including possession of property over $5,000, possession of property under $5,000, impaired driving, flight from peace officer, two charges of operation while prohibited, two charges of fraudulent concealment, possession of controlled substance — meth — and two charges of failure to comply with a release order.
She is also now charged with escaping lawful custody.
Wood has been charged with assisting escape of prisoner; identify fraud; and uttering a forged document.
Fort Saskatchewan Correctional Centre workers seek third-party review of 'toxic' workplace
Four Westlock residents charged after 10-month drugs and firearms investigation: RCMP
You can also support our journalism by becoming a digital subscriber. Subscribers gain unlimited access to The Edmonton Journal, Edmonton Sun, National Post, and 13 other Canadian news sites. The Edmonton Journal | The Edmonton Sun
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Yahoo
3 hours ago
- Yahoo
Stolen mail tossed along US-131; charges filed
KALAMAZOO, Mich. (WOOD) — A man linked to an Illinois theft ring who fled police in Kalamazoo, tossing letters along US-131 during the chase, appeared in federal court this week on mail theft charges. Dequon Darvece Hardimon, 26, was indicted for conspiracy to steal mail and possession of stolen mail. Police are looking for two others. They're accused of coming to Michigan from Illinois in a rental vehicle 'for the purpose of stealing mail.' During a May 19 police chase along southbound US-131, stolen mail was tossed from the windows of the fleeing vehicle, officials said. Some was recovered. According to federal court records, thieves targeted mailboxes throughout the Kalamazoo area, looking specifically for personal checks and business checks. The stolen checks were then fraudulently cashed. Postal inspectors were conducting surveillance in mid-May at Kalamazoo's Miller Road branch when a 2012 GMC Arcadia pulled up to the mailboxes. Two men jumped out and, using an access key, got into the mailboxes, 'dumping the collected mail into the front passenger and rear passenger seats' of the Arcadia, according to a criminal complaint. Postal inspectors, emergency lights activated, approached the Arcadia, which jumped a concrete curb and drove across the lawn in an attempt to flee, records show. The chase was on. 'During the pursuit, postal inspectors observed large quantities (of) mail being discarded from the target vehicle, primarily along U.S. 131 south,' records show. Postal inspectors were assisted by three other police agencies in the pursuit, which ended about 15 miles away, on Red Arrow Highway in the VanBuren County village of Mattawan. Hardimon said the only reason he stopped was because of engine failure, and he attempted to run 'because he hates the police,' a U.S. postal inspector wrote in a criminal complaint. Hardimon was arrested. Two others made good their escape. Officials found multiple pieces of mail inside the Arcadia, along with multiple personal checks with payment receipts, court records show. Hardimon told investigators he was offered $1,000 to drive the two unidentified individuals around the Kalamazoo area, records show. Discarded mail was recovered along US-131 that matched mail found inside the Arcadia, records show. During a federal court hearing in Grand Rapids this week, a tentative trial date was set for August. The two federal charges filed against Hardimon are each punishable by up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Copyright 2025 Nexstar Media, Inc. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
New York Post
5 hours ago
- New York Post
Travis Decker was on ‘brink of something really extreme' before daughters were killed: Court docs
Travis Decker was clearly on 'the brink of something really extreme' in the weeks before he allegedly slaughtered his three little girls, new court documents show. The still-on-the-loose homeless veteran's escalating behavior became so concerning that his ex-wife — who has since said Decker is more a 'broken'' man than a cold-blooded killer — hurriedly filed a protection order petition against the accused killer. 'He had seemed better, then it seemed like things just started happening one after another,' Whitney Decker wrote in the documents, obtained by 3 Travis Decker was 'on the brink of something extreme' before he allegedly killed his daughters, according to court documents. Chelan County Sheriff's Office The cracks in Decker's psyche were reportedly showing at his workplace, where he faced bullying and isolation from his colleagues. His supervisor became so concerned with Decker's mental state, he called Whitney to warn of Travis' declining health. 'His boss told him or told me that he had talked to Travis on Friday and he seemed like he was on the brink of something really extreme,' according to the petition. Around a month before the murders, the accused killer abruptly ended his daily counseling calls he had been holding with a Georgia pastor — some of which includedconversations which lasted several hours, the documents reveal. 3 Paityn, Evelyn, and Olivia Decker were found dead with plastic bags over their heads and their wrists zip-tied. Provided by Cozart Law About a week before the tragedy, Decker was involved in a car wreck that seemingly triggered even worse behavior. Decker called his daughters — Paityn, 9, Evelyn, 8, and Olivia, 5 — after the crash and eerily warned 'he was going to jail,' before turning up on the family's doorstep hours later to apologize. All the while, Decker apparently made attempts to reconcile relationships with his brother and father, and attempted to rekindle his romance with Whitney. 'Last week he tried to reconcile our marriage and had even made comments to the girls about him moving back in, and I rejected his advancements,' Whitney wrote in the petition. 3 Decker is still on the loose. AP Decker allegedly cracked last week and killed the three girls during their court-ordered visit with him, which he was granted every other weekend. The bodies of the girls were then found June 2 with plastic bags over their heads and their wrists zip-tied, not far from their father's abandoned truck in a remote campground about 170 miles of the Canadian border. Preliminary investigations indicate the sisters likely died from asphyxiation. Decker was still in the wind Saturday. Authorities have more than 100 law enforcement personnel involved in the search and were fielding more than 500 tips as they hunted for Decker, according to KOMO News. The missing dad apparently searched 'how to relocate to Canada' before allegedly carrying out the horrifying crime. Police have warned the public not to try contacting or approaching Decker and do not know if he is armed. A $20,000 reward is being offered for information leading to his arrest.
Yahoo
6 hours ago
- Yahoo
Christine Van Geyn: Do police have the right to peer at you in your car with a drone?
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home's private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police? These questions are not hypotheticals; they are real live issues in Canadian law. We are living in the mass surveillance era. But many Canadians do not have a thorough understanding of how far surveillance goes, or what the limits on it are, or whether our legal protections are adequate. The police in Kingston, Ont., are ticketing drivers at red lights for merely touching or holding their cellphones based on evidence collected by a drone. The Supreme Court recently heard a case about police entering a private driveway and not just looking in a truck window, but opening the door and collecting evidence — all without a warrant. The Alberta Court of Kings Bench just considered a case involving the facial recognition technology of Clearview AI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government was tracking the cellphone location data of 33 million Canadians. After the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, the government ordered the freezing of bank accounts of a police-compiled 'blacklist' of demonstrators, which was distributed by the government to a variety of financial institutions and even lobby groups. What these cases are demonstrating is that we have entered the era of mass surveillance, and Canada's legal protections are inadequate. First, Canada's privacy legislation is outdated. Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne has said we are at a 'pivotal time' for privacy rights in Canada. Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has also called for updates to Canadian privacy laws, 'so they apply to all data, including anonymized data.' Much has changed since the current federal privacy legislation was drafted in the early 2000s, but efforts to modernize this law died when Parliament was prorogued. Second, when it comes to state intrusions, the concept of privacy may be inadequate. Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has interpreted this right to mean the protection of a person's 'reasonable expectations of privacy' against state intrusions. The notion of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' has become a mantra in Section 8 jurisprudence. But some academics have said that in the era of mass surveillance, this guiding principle is an inadequate gatekeeper. In a lecture for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's new free course on privacy rights, Osgoode Hall Law professor François Tanguay-Renaud proposes a thought experiment that reveals the inadequacy of 'privacy' as an organizing principle. What if the police were recording people on the street, with drones following people and recording their movements as they went about their day, zooming in on their cellphones and recording their conversations? In such a scenario, where people are in plain view, privacy is an inadequate concept to limit what we all see intuitively as oppressive state conduct. At one time, this hypothetical might have been considered far-fetched. Today it is eerily similar to the Kingston police drone scenario. In Kingston, police are using a drone to take aerial images peering into cars and zooming in on cellphones. Those drivers do have reasonable expectations of privacy inside their cars, but what would limit this police conduct if they surveilled citizens on sidewalks or parks, where they were in plain view without those privacy expectations? A principled line must be drawn between things done in plain sight that police can view and constant surveillance using enhanced technology. It may not be possible to draw that line on the basis of the existence or not of 'reasonable expectations of privacy.' There are other values that could serve as guiding or informing principles for Section 8. There is nothing in the text of Section 8 that mandates the gatekeeper of the right be 'reasonable expectations of privacy' rather than another interest, like dignity, liberty, security, anonymity, public confidence in the administration of justice, and many more. Indeed, American jurisprudence has been moving away from the concept of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' as the sole guiding principle for their 4th Amendment. To meet the challenges of the surveillance era, it is well past time for Parliament and the provincial legislatures to update privacy laws. But as recent police conduct shows, it's time for our Section 8 jurisprudence to be revisited as well, to meet the emerging challenges of the surveillance state. National Post Christine Van Geyn is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitutional Foundation. Canadians who want to learn more about their privacy rights in Canada can sign up for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's free course at Opinion: In 2020 the world shut down, and Canadians lost their privacy rights Facial recognition tool used by RCMP deemed illegal mass surveillance of unwitting Canadians
