A Crown prosecutor is asking a judge for a psychiatric assessment to help determine if a man who has pled guilty to sexual assaults in Squamish and Ladysmith and a robbery in North Vancouver should be considered a long-term or dangerous offender.
Crown counsel Nicole Gregoire applied for the psychiatric assessment at a sentencing hearing that began Monday in B.C. Supreme Court for Shaun Richard Funk, 38.
Funk pled guilty June 4 to two violent sexual assaults plus robberies in August and September of 2009, beginning with a robbery in North Vancouver on Aug. 7, 2009.
Gregoire told Justice Barry Davies that Funk entered the Sunscape Tanning Studio in the Westview shopping mall just before 8 p.m. that day where a 23-year-old woman was working alone. He walked behind the counter and pressed a butter knife into her ribs, telling her to give him all the money from the till and her wallet. The employee handed over about $300 from the till. When Funk left, the woman called police.
Funk's later offences were far more violent.
On Aug. 28, 2009, he broke into a car in Squamish where a woman was sleeping, and drove her to a wooded area, where he repeatedly sexually assaulted her. He then drove the woman to Vancouver, keeping her face pressed into his lap and telling her not to look at him. At one point he stopped at the Bank of Montreal in North Vancouver to use the woman's bank card to withdraw money from her account. That was captured on the bank's surveillance camera and later helped police to identify him.
Funk eventually got out of the car and took off when he reached Burnaby, leaving the woman in the car. She called police.
The next violent assault happened Sept. 25, 2009, in Ladysmith, where Funk had followed a woman he met at a Squamish campground. On that night, they had an argument and Funk went out to a bar by himself, eventually taking off without paying his bar tab.
In the early hours of the morning, another woman in that town woke in her house to find Funk staring at her in her bed with his hand over her nose and mouth. He choked her and forced her to have sex, while telling her not to make any noise, said Gregoire.
The victim told police Funk told her he had a gun.
At one point Funk grabbed the woman and carried her down the stairs of her house. When he did that, she managed to grab her cellphone off the bedside table and dial 9-1-1, screaming that she was being raped. She also screamed for her teenaged daughter - who was asleep in the house - to call 9-1-1.
Funk was identified as a possible suspect a couple of weeks later.
He was eventually caught on Nov. 18, 2009, when a woman in Regina - who had been made aware that police were looking for Funk through media reports - called police to say he was living with her daughter.
If Davies orders the special psychiatric assessment, it will be used to consider if he should be deemed either a "dangerous" or "longterm" offender. An offender deemed "dangerous" can be handed an indeterminate jail sentence. Both dangerous and long-term offenders can also be placed under lengthy terms of supervision - of up to 10 years - when they get out of jail.
