A former Prince George man was back in court Monday to deal with the last of the charges he had been facing from the days when he was allegedly a member of a local gang.
Tyler Sheldon Borrowman, 27, was sentenced to a six-month conditional sentence and 18 months probation after pleading guilty to two firearms charges related to a July 30, 2010 incident when police found a nine millimetre Beretta pistol in his truck.
Police had identified Borrowman as a member of the Independent Soldiers, a street-level gang that ran crack shacks in the city, when they saw him driving a pickup truck on 18th Avenue by the Aquatic Centre.
The truck had his licence plate on it, but it was registered to a white truck and he was behind the wheel of a black one and so was pulled over on suspicion of vehicle theft.
Borrowman got out, locked the vehicle and told officers it was his and had recently got it repainted.
It turned out that was true, but due to the new paint, police had trouble verifying the vehicle identification number on the truck's exterior and when one of the doors was opened to check the number there, the handgun was found hidden between the driver's seat and centre console.
Ordinarily, Crown prosecution would be seeking the mandatory minimum of three years in jail for the offence. However, the charge dates back to before the mandatory minimum came into effect and there are rights and freedoms-related issues around how the gun was found.
But perhaps the biggest reason Borrowman got a break is that he has turned his life around, the court heard Monday.
Shortly after his arrest, Borrowman moved to Saskatoon where he is now runs a concrete business that employs eight people and is the father of a young child with a common law wife.
Moreover, indications are he has stayed out of trouble.
Although he has family in this province, Borrowman has no intention of returning to British Columbia, let alone Prince George, defence lawyer Daniel Geller told the court.
"The situation is that his involvement was directly related to people he knew actually from his childhood in this city and the most dramatic and most effective way of starting over was to leave the city and to leave the province, which he has done," Geller said.
Borrowman's criminal record includes an assault from 2007 for which he received 18 months probation.
Two days after the first gun-related incident, Borrowman was arrested again when an employee at a laundry found what police described as a loaded .45-calibre high capacity handgun inside a sock while washing clothes for a customer.
The charges on that matter were stayed in November 2011.
A conditional sentence is served at home, rather than in jail, with conditions limiting the time the convicted person can be off the property. Borrowman was also issued a 10-year firearms prohibition.
