By Tina Comeau
THE VANGUARD
NovaNewsNow.com
In a Yarmouth courtroom this week the man that shot and killed one person and seriously wounded another in a 1992 shooting told the surviving victim of the shootings that she has no reason to fear him if he released early from prison.
“I want you to know you have nothing to fear from me,” Clayton Otis Jacquard said to Barbara Wilkinson, as she sat at the rear of the courtroom.
Jacquard, who was 20 years old at the time of the shootings and is now 38, testified at a judicial review of his parole ineligibility on Wednesday, June 2. Jacquard is serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years after being convicted of first-degree murder for the shooting of his former stepfather Sandy Hurlburt. He is also serving a five-year concurrent sentence for the attempted murder of Barbara Wilkinson, who was living common-law with Hurlburt at the time of the shooting.
Jacquard told a jury that shooting Wilkinson probably bothers him more than killing Hurlburt because she was an innocent victim. “What happened to her was very unfortunate, I wish it hadn’t,” he said.
Crown attorney Mark Heerema, however, challenged Jacquard about his remorse. He said testimony from former parole officers during the review and a report prepared for the hearing show that during the past 17 years Jacquard has not openly and frequently expressed his remorse.
“Where’s your, ‘I’m so sorry? I never intended this,’?” he said, adding it was simply a matter of luck that Wilkinson was not killed.
Jacquard said that he’s been told he doesn’t show as much remorse as he should, but he is sorry despite what people think or observe.
“I never wanted to take anyone’s life . . . I have remorse for my crime. I am upset that I killed Sandy Hurlburt and that I shot Barb,” he said. “But if he (Sandy) had gotten hit by a truck the day before would I have been upset? No.”
Hurlburt, the jury was told – and the issue was raised at Jacquard’s 1994 trial – used to physically and verbally abuse Jacquard and his sister in the years he was married to their mother. For Jacquard the abuse began around the time he was nine and lasted until he was around 16.
On the issue of remorse, Jacquard told the Crown he can’t go back and change things, he can only focus on the future.
Still, the past was revisited during the hearing when Jacquard took the stand. At one point Justice Kevin Coady interrupted the back-and-forth exchange of questions and answers between Jacquard and his lawyer Robert Gregan and told Jacquard, “You have a story to tell. Why don’t you just tell us your story.”
Jacquard talked about how in the two days prior to the shootings he had lost more than $800 gambling on VLT machines over a 23-hour period. He was depressed, he was thinking back to the years of abuse he had suffered and he was contemplating suicide. He said he was on his way home on Dec. 16 but stopped at Hurlburt’s apartment on Parade Street because it was on the way to where he was going.
He said on the evening of Dec. 17 it was his intention to commit suicide with a shotgun in front of Hurlburt. But instead Jacquard described himself as being “a deer caught in the headlights” or experiencing “a chain reaction” when Hurlburt came through a doorway in the apartment. Hurlburt was shot in the back and the chest. Jacquard said other than hearing Wilkinson screaming he doesn’t remember much more about what happened at the time of the shooting.
He left the apartment, hid the weapon, went to a friend’s house and told the friend to call the police so he could turn himself in.
“I knew I had done something wrong,” he said.
The Crown, though, reminded Jacquard that at his trial in 1994, a jury had convicted him of deliberately planning and executing the murder. Heerema added this hearing is not a retrial. In spite of the abuse that Jacquard suffered, the Crown said the fact was he was convicted of first-degree murder.
