WARNING: This story contains graphic material. Discretion is advised.
A man who admitted to killing a low-level drug dealer in the Okanagan by bashing his head with a shovel in 2005 has died in prison.
On Tuesday, the Correctional Service of Canada announced that Grant Fralic had died a day earlier of apparent natural causes following an illness.
He’d been at Bath Institution near Kingston, Ont.
His next of kin have been notified, along with police and the coroner, the correctional service said, and officials will be reviewing the death.
Fralic had been serving an indeterminate sentence since 2008 for second-degree murder in the death of Jody Mitchell Elliott.
The act left a gruesome scene on Westbank First Nation land near Kelowna, with the victim having been shot and mutilated.
Robert Scott Juker, Ramoncito Viejon and Daniel James Mader were charged along with Fralic.
Elliott, 26, was described as a low-level drug dealer with a long criminal history who eventually had a bounty placed on him.
In November 2005, he was ambushed at a flophouse, shot twice, then taken to a remote site and viciously beaten with a hammer.
He was left for dead, but his attackers later returned to clean up the site and remove the bullets from the body.
They found that Elliott, however, was still alive.
He was killed with more hits to the head, with Fralic later admitting that he delivered the death blow with a shovel.
Fralic also admitted to using an X-acto knife to cut off Elliott’s head, hands and one ear.
Viejon was sentenced to 11 years behind bars, while Juker and Mader each received eight and a half years.