Nearly $50,500 worth jewelry seized from a Prince George home where alleged gangster Joey Lamont Arrance once lived will be returned to the woman who also lived there.
Last Friday, a B.C. Supreme Court master signed an order to discontinue proceedings by the B.C. civil forfeiture director to take control of 24 items after it was agreed that Kirsten Sabrina Campbell-Fredin was not Arrance's girlfriend.
That still leaves 10 items worth nearly $195,000 in total, plus nearly $25,000 in cash that the director is alleging Arrance accumulated as proceeds of crime. They include a 174.3-gram men's diamond pendant worth $42,610 and a 342-gram Brietling men's watch worth $37,016.
In a response filed in November to the director's petition, Campbell-Fredin said she was not Arrance's girlfriend, only that he had been staying at the 4337 Foster Rd. home of her now-deceased mother, Linda Joyce Fredin, for about two months when RCMP executed a search warrant on Sept. 19, 2010.
Campbell-Fredin also said a portion of the jewelry police seized was hers or her mothers and was not gained through criminal activity.
The raid was part of a sequence of events that also saw the wheelchair-bound Linda Fredin die from injuries sustained in a late-November 2010 fire at the home. The blaze erupted less than 24 hours after a fire gutted a tattoo parlour Arrance allegedly owned at the corner of Victoria Street and Seventh Avenue.
Police treated both fires as suspicious but no one has since been charged.
Police have identified Arrance as a junior member or "striker" with the Renegades Motorcycle Club, an affiliate of the Hells Angels and Game Tight Soldiers organized crime groups.
Arrance, who had remained in custody since his arrest in September 2010, eventually pleaded guilty to possession of a prohibited or restricted firearm with ammunition and breach of an undertaking or recognizance.
In May 2012, he was sentenced to a further three-and-a-half months in jail and then banned from coming within 100 kilometres of Prince George for a further 18 months.
Arrance also faced a charge of sexually assaulting a woman at the Renegades clubhouse in July 2010. In November 2011, he was found not guilty of the offence following a trial before a provincial court judge.
Arrance has until April 9 to provide documentation to the court supporting his claim that his portion of the jewelry was attained legitimately.
