An assault and robbery that saw a Penticton man lose two TVs and suffer a fractured eye socket will likely result in jail time for one of his attackers.
Ryan Joseph Patt, 25, was convicted this week in provincial court in Penticton on single counts of assault causing bodily harm and robbery in relation to the incident on March 28, 2014, in an apartment on Skaha Lake Place.
Judge Meg Shaw recounted in her decision the circumstances of the offence heard at trial in September, including how Patt and the victim were dating a pair of sisters and socialized together sometimes.
Around 3 a.m. on the day of the attack, Patt phoned the victim and asked him to pick up his girlfriend in Summerland, where she had been drinking and fighting with her sister.
When the victim refused, Patt accompanied the woman in a taxi to her mom’s home in Penticton.
Patt then walked for nearly an hour to the victim’s home, where he arrived with an unknown man around 6 a.m. and entered the apartment.
The victim testified that once inside his home, both Patt and the unknown man delivered multiple blows to his head and face, resulting in cuts, bruises and a fractured orbital bone.
The unknown man told the victim the beating was “because he had beaten on his girlfriend,” and also warned, “We will come back and kill you” if the police were called, Shaw said.
The assailants then each grabbed a TV from the apartment and left.
“The entire incident occurred within 12 minutes,” said Shaw.
In his testimony at trial, Patt denied hitting the victim and also claimed that he didn’t know the identity of the unknown man, whom he said he met outside the victim’s apartment building.
Shaw rejected Patt’s testimony and said it had “no air of reality to it.”
The judge suggested instead that Patt was angry he had to deal with the victim’s “drunk and acting-out girlfriend,” whom he suspected was beaten by her boyfriend, and therefore wanted to punish the victim.
Shaw did, however, acquit Patt of a third charge of uttering threats.
Patt was released on $1,000 bail on April 2, but was ordered back into custody on Aug. 19, according to court records, which don’t provide a reason for his continued detention. He appeared this week via videoconference from Kamloops Regional Correctional Centre.
His criminal record includes convictions for uttering threats, breaches of court orders and theft. His last prior conviction was possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking, which earned him a six-month jail sentence in September 2013.
A sentencing hearing for Patt’s most recent convictions is set for a later date. The maximum penalty for robbery is life imprisonment.
