A former Abbotsford man with a history of violent sexual assaults involving children has allegedly re-offended in Kelowna.
Kevin Falcon, the leader of the provincial opposition party, spoke at a press conference on Thursday (Feb. 29), and asked why the public was not notified of the latest release from prison of convicted sex offender Taylor Dueck.
“This government neglected to notify the public that there was a dangerous pedophile like this in their presence,” Falcon said.
Dueck previously served multiple sentences for convictions of sexual assault. He is now being accused of assaulting an 11-year-old girl in Kelowna, Falcon said.
Cpl. Michael Gauthier with the Kelowna RCMP confirmed that Dueck is back in custody.
Gauthier said police had requested that a Public Interest Disclosure (PID) be issued prior to Dueck’s release.
He said the “threshold was not met in this case based on the totality of the circumstances,” and the RCMP’s request for a PID was denied.
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Safety Minister Mike Farnworth also spoke at the legislature on Feb. 29, saying he is “very angry over what has happened.”
The minister said he has ordered an investigation into all provincial and federal agencies, including BC Corrections, that were involved in the decision to deny the RCMP’s request for a PID.
“I want to be sure there were no system failures and everything that should have been done is done because, quite frankly, this should never have happened,” Farnworth said.
There is no timeline for when the investigation will be completed into the decision not to issue a PID regarding Dueck’s release from prison.
“We are going to make sure this never happens again,” Farnworth said.
Dueck, 29, was in prison in 2018 when the Parole Board of Canada denied his application for parole, saying there were “reasonable grounds” to believe that he was “likely to commit an offence causing death or serious harm to another person.”
The parole board documents indicated that Dueck had sexually assaulted four teenage girls in 2014.
The documents also indicated that Dueck had other allegations of sexual misbehaviour that did not result in charges, including kissing a five-year-old girl, groping a nine-year-old girl while playing hide-and-seek, and threatening to post sexually explicit photos online of a girl if she did not have sex with him.
The board noted that, although Dueck had taken sex offender and other programs in prison, he continued to minimize his offences and was resistant to talking about them nor did he have a release plan to manage his risk in the community.
He was released in February 2020 after serving his full sentence of three years and seven months for sexual assault and assault with a weapon.
At that time, the Abbotsford Police Department issued a public notice that Dueck was being released from custody and would be living in the community.
The release stated that Dueck has a criminal history that includes two counts of sexual assault, sexual assault of a person under 16 years of age and sexual assault with a weapon.
Less than two months after his release from prison, Dueck was charged with sexual interference of a person under 16 in Hatzic.
He later pleaded guilty to that offence and was sentenced in August 2022 to one year in jail and three years’ probation. Dueck was released from prison in June 2023 and was living in a “safe house” in Kelowna for former inmates.
– with files from Vikki Hopes
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