A Winnipeg grocer and his staff are being sued by a self-professed career criminal who says he was beaten by eight or nine employees while attempting to steal a car from the store parking lot last year.
A statement of claim filed in Winnipeg court by Michael Prince on Aug. 12 names Dino’s Food Mart owner Rajan Varma and eight John and Jane Does whom he says “kicked, punched and hit him with a hammer” in the store parking lot, after Prince says he stole a jacket from inside the store containing a wallet and key fob.
The statement of claim says he went home and returned 30 minutes later to steal the vehicle and found the car boxed in. Undeterred, he used the fob to enter the vehicle, triggering an alarm which “alerted Dino’s personnel.”
He says they set upon him, pulled him out of the car and beat him.
Prince ran to his home nearby where his brother called 911.
Winnipeg Police charged Prince with theft and say no assault charges have been laid against any staff at Dino’s.
Prince alleges he sustained head trauma and hearing loss from the Feb. 26 incident and suffers “from constant fear, anxiety, apprehensiveness, depression and feelings of worthlessness.”
Court records show Prince has a long criminal history, even boasting in an unrelated pre-sentence report last summer that he led a theft ring that stole more than $1-million in property over the course of a decade, which funded his drug habit by selling stolen goods at bars and bingo halls.
Neither Prince nor his lawyer would be interviewed by Global News.
Varma declined to be interviewed but says he’s working with a lawyer on a statement of defense.
This comes on the heels of a Lindsay, Ont. man being charged with assault for attacking a crossbow-wielding home intruder last month.
While no one at Dino’s faces criminal charges, personal injury lawyer Chris Wullum explains that doesn’t mean there aren’t grounds for a civil suit.
“It doesn’t necessarily mean that on a civil standard, they still didn’t commit an assault or other sort of tortious activity,” says Wullum, who isn’t involved in this matter.
Prince is seeking unspecified damages for being unable to provide for himself now.
“In terms of seeking damages for some sort of a loss of income. I don’t think the law, if indeed his income comes primarily from acts of theft, which seems to be the case based on some of his criminal history, I think a court would probably be hard pressed to award him those types of damages. It’d be public policy reasons why you wouldn’t do that,” Wullum says.
Federal Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre has recently made political hay of issue of property owners standing up to criminals.
“It is wrong for the law for police and for judges to apply a complicated indecipherable legal doctrine against you when you are only doing what is right,” he said at a press conference on Aug. 29.