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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 | Your community newspaper since 1916

CITIZEN PHOTO BY JAMES DOYLE

Red Hot Chili Papers Citizen circulation manager Derek Springall stirs a pot of chili while director of advertising Shawn Cornell looks on at the Prince George Citizen booth on Saturday at Studio 2880 during the Community Arts Council’s 43rd annual Chili Fest and Spring Arts Bazaar. The Prince George Public Library’s chili was the returning champion, while The Citizen’s team – the Red Hot Chili Papers – came in fifth.

Fraudster’s mental health P.G. woman ranked Top 100 in Maxim cover girl contest at issue during sentencing Frank PEEBLES Citizen staff fpeebles@pgcitizen.ca

Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca Whether a woman who stole more than $350,000 from her employer was suffering from depression emerged as a key issue as Crown and defence lawyers argued their positions during a sentencing hearing on Monday. Crown prosecutor John Neal is seeking a three-year prison sentence for Debra Velma Penttila, 63, while defence counsel Jason LeBlond is submitting a conditional sentence order lasting two years less a day followed by three years probation is appropriate. Penttila has pleaded guilty to a count of fraud over $5,000. Between November 2004 and February 2011, she used her co-signing authority to alter 166 cheques adding up to $362,740 to make them payable to herself, the court has heard. The money was spent on gambling. While the court cannot consider gambling as a mitigating factor, LeBlond argued Penttila could have been suffering from depression and encouraged provincial court judge Michael Gray to take the possibility into account.

However, Neal countered that nowhere in the two psychiatric assessments conducted on her was it said that Penttila was diagnosed with the the ailment and none has been made to this day. “Neither of those doctors is prepared to say that mental illness led to the offending or that mental illness led to the gambling that led to the offending,” Neal said. “And yet, my learned friend is inviting the court to do exactly that – to make its own psychiatric diagnosis, to go further than the medical professionals were prepared to do in this case.” LeBlond painted a picture of a woman in a state of high stress at the time she committed the crime. Her husband was suffering from health issues and not working, her father had recently died and the effects of Alzheimers had put her mother into a home. In response to an “accumulation of stress,” and perhaps depression, Penttila turned to gambling as a form of relief. She ran up roughly $100,000 in debt through credit cards and a line of credit before she started to commit the fraud. The court has heard that Penttila

found ways to alter cheques sent out and received by her employer to make her the payee and employed various tactics to string out the fraud. By the time the fraud was discovered, the company’s books were a “mess” and charges were not laid until February 2017 because it took so long to determine the extent of the scam. In some ways, conditional sentence order followed by probation is more onerous, LeBlond suggested, because it would last for five years, compared to the three years in jail Crown counsel is seeking. Conditional sentences are served at home but with conditions such as a curfew. If the judge decides in favour of jail time, LeBlond argued for two years plus a day so it could be served in a federal institution where programs for inmates tend to be better. “I just want to say I am sincerely sorry for everything I have done and everbody that I have hurt,” Penttila said when given a chance to speak. Gray will issue his decision at a later date, likely near the end of this month.

Teen nabbed for excessive speeding Citizen staff An 18-year-old youth is facing some stiff penalties for allegedly driving at more than twice the speed limit. Prince George RCMP said he was pulled over on May 27 after he was clocked at 131 km/h in a 60 km/h section of Foothills Boulevard. He was issued a ticket carrying a $483 fine and the vehicle he was driving was impounded for seven days, despite the fact that he was not the registered owner. The teen will be required to cover the cost of tow-

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ing and storing the vehicle, and a report of dangerous driving was submitted to the Superintendent of Motor Vehicles. The youth was among 11 drivers who were issued tickets for excessive speeding and their vehicles impounded during May. As well, 36 tickets were issued for speeding in a school zone and 251 for speeding elsewhere. And RCMP volunteers dedicated 74 hours to a speed watch campaign, both with and without the assistance of officers. In all, 4,734 vehicles were observed, with 2,751 of those vehicles traveling above the posted speed.

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A Prince George woman is gaining altitude in a glamour magazine model search. Brandi Hansen has been voted through by online fans into the Top 100, leaving thousands of other contestants in her jet stream. She was expecting nothing but turbulence when she entered the Maxim Cover Girl 2019 Model Competition because, by her own admission, she is not a model, won’t be a model, and refused to go through the usual Maxim customs with her entry. “I’m doing things differently than what Maxim is used to,” she said. “I submitted my photos on a whim, I didn’t expect it would go anywhere, but they contacted me from Maxim and told me I was in. Wait...what? Yeah, I was in, even though all my photos show me hunting, fishing, shooting my bow, flying a plane, completely clothed in every shot. I didn’t have a single pretty photo.” It resonated with the public. Hansen’s presentation was, by Maxim standards, a bit like showing up to a fighter jet convention in a helicopter, but the crowds still gathered round. Hansen sailed through the preliminary rounds. She kept winning her groupings, her ball caps and camo always winning over the lingerie and bikinis. She is now into the semi-finals. If it all ended now, Hansen said, she has already made a point. Comments and opinions have flowed in, many of them from parents of little girls thanking her profusely for reframing the conversation around femininity. That was exactly the flight plan Hansen filed when she entered the competition. She is a professional pilot, working on

Violence against Indigenous women continues

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HANSEN her accreditation at BP Aviation in Penticton and the Victoria Flying Club. She is also an active member of Search & Rescue. She pledged at the start of the Maxim adventure that should she win the $10,000 prize money, all of it would be divided up into donations: four for scholarships for aspiring female pilots and one to B.C. Search & Rescue. “When I was growing up, my favourite TV show was Airwolf and my favourite superhero was Wonder Woman because she had an invisible jet,” she said, explaining where her aviation passion flew in from. She named her donation pledge the Higher Further Faster Fund, in honour of today’s breakthrough female superhero Captain Marvel that is popular with all genders. “I grew up playing with my brothers,” Hansen said. “Indiana Jones was my No. 1 favourite. If I wasn’t going to be a pilot, I would have become an archeologist. We played He-Man and G.I. Joe and Transformers. So many girls get handed pink bunnies and unicorns, and that’s fine, there’s nothing wrong with that at all, but we just have to know that girls are capable of Airwolf and Barbie. So are boys.” — see ‘I’M JUST, page 3

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