High-risk offender released in Halifax charged with sex crimes, other offences

 A week after high-risk offender Gamon Jay Leacock had multiple charges relating to alleged harassment, extortion and fraud stayed in a Dartmouth court, Halifax Regional Police have laid new charges against the 49-year-old man that include sex crimes and other offences.

Leacock was arrested Monday and charged with two counts each of aggravated sexual assault, unlawful confinement, uttering threats and breaching a release order, and single counts of robbery, assault, break and enter to commit an offence, escaping custody and possession of stolen property under $5,000. 

Those charges, which all have an offence date of Jan. 15, fall in the same vein as what sent Leacock to prison for 14 years in jail in 2009. They relate to two separate incidents Monday afternoon.

Halifax police said in a release that they were called at about 3:05 p.m. Monday to report of a robbery in the area of Hunter and Cunard streets in Halifax. They said that shortly before 3 p.m. a man approached a woman who was parked in her car on South Street and offered her money in exchange for a drive to Cunard Street. When they arrived, the man threatened the woman, and said he had a firearm. When she tried to get out of the car he assaulted her and took her belongings.

Shortly after, a suspect matching the man’s description entered a home on Clifton Street where two women were inside. The man had a brick and broken bottle and locked the women in a bedroom. He threatened them, assaulted them and sexually assaulted them before they were able to fight him off and escape to call for help.

The man then fled the residence.

All three women were taken to hospital for treatment.

At about 3:30 p.m. officers arrested the suspect, who was found hiding in the backyard of a residence in the 2300 block of Hunter Street. He was taken to hospital for a medical condition and while awaiting treatment he attempted to flee, but officers apprehended him within seconds.

Const. John MacLeod said the medical condition wasn’t related to Leacock’s arrest or his altercation with the occupants of the home.

In October, police advised the public that Leacock was living in HRM after being released from federal prison. He had served his full sentence for convictions on nine counts of robbery, six of uttering threats, two each of sexual assault with a weapon, forcible confinement, administering a noxious substance and assault, and single counts of criminal harassment, escape from lawful custody, assaulting a peace officer with weapon, intimidation of a justice system participant, theft under $5,000, failing to comply with a court order and failing to stop at a motor vehicle accident.

He was arrested Jan. 4 after someone called police to report that Leacock had broken into a woman’s home on a number of occasions and threatened her in order to obtain property and money.

The woman is known to Leacock, police said, and the incidents occurred between October and December.

Leacock was charged with extortion, fraud under $5,000, uttering threats, four counts of use and possession of stolen credit cards, unlawfully being in a dwelling house, theft under $5,000 and two counts of failing to comply with release conditions. However, the Crown stayed those charges last Tuesday after Leacock entered into a one-year peace bond with the woman who was the alleged victim. The stay means the charges didn’t proceed, but can be brought back before the court within a year.

MacLeod said the woman in those incidents was not one of the victims from Monday robbery and sexual assaults.

Among the crimes he was convicted for in 2009, Leacock forced a friend’s daughter and her partner to smoke crack cocaine and perform sex acts after assaulting them. He threatened to kill the couple, sexually assaulted them, and stole their bank cards and PINs..

The parole board in a previous decision described Leacock as having “potential for flagrant aggressiveness,” and noted that a psychological assessment in 2019 said that “there is an unacceptably high risk that your re-offending would cause serious physical harm.”

Leacock has 63 Criminal Code convictions as well as a series of institutional infractions from his time behind bars.

Leacock was scheduled to appear in Halifax provincial court Tuesday to be arraigned on the new charges.