A chainsaw thief is off to jail after a string of crimes, two of which were caught on camera.
Christopher John Uden, 26, appeared on CCTV in St. Albert Provincial Court Monday to plead guilty to and be sentenced for two counts of property-related mischief, two counts of theft under $5,000, one count of possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose and one count of failing to comply with a condition of a release.
The charges related to a string of thefts committed over the last nine months, which provincial crown prosecutor John Donahoe summarized in court.
On July 2, 2012, Donahoe said, Evansberg RCMP got a call from a man saying that someone had tried to break into his home near Nojack (which is west of Chip Lake). The owner found that someone had cut the fence around a building on the property that contained a quad.
A wildlife monitoring camera set up by a neighbour took a photo of a man with a red Ford truck cutting said fence, Donahoe said. When Uden was arrested on another charge, he was identified as the man in the photo.
Later, on Aug. 31, a man reported that Uden had taken $198 from his account using a fraudulent cheque. When arrested on another matter, Uden admitted that he had written the cheque to himself.
On Oct. 1, another person told police that someone had broken into his truck and stolen a chainsaw. “Cameras seem to be the bane of Mr. Uden’s existence,” quipped Donahoe, as a security camera had caught Uden riding up to that truck on a bicycle and stealing the saw.
At the Castle Motel in Edson on Jan. 25, 2013 at around 5:46 a.m., Donahoe continued, Uden broke into a vehicle, stole a wallet, and used a credit card in it to buy $6.15 of food from a local Fas Gas outlet.
Uden’s most recent offence was in Edson last Feb. 28, and was committed while on release for other charges.
There, around midnight, a man caught Uden inside his vehicle, apparently in the process of stealing it. “Mr. Uden has a knife and starts waving the knife around,” Donahoe said, but the man kept Uden on the scene until police arrived. When they arrested Uden, they found that he had the complainant’s house keys and lighter on his person and that he had violated his release conditions.
The court heard that Uden had a criminal record, but that he had also completed a drug treatment course in the last nine months and had unresolved family and addictions issues. He had also already spent 46 days in jail awaiting sentencing for these crimes.
Judge Bruce Garriock sentenced Uden to an additional 164 days in jail.
