A Kelowna, B.C., woman struggling with drug and mental health issues walked at least 90 kilometres while pushing a shopping cart before she stopped and lit fire to two trees in Enderby and ended up in police custody.
Luckily, the fires sparked on May 28 caused minimal damage, but Sandra Lynn Ratcliffe, 45, then spent the next 135 days in jail awaiting trial on the charge of intentionally and recklessly causing damage by fire.
This week, she was sentenced by provincial court judge George Leven to time served, with the months she spent behind bars taken at two-to-one. She is now serving two years on probation.
Ratcliffe told the court she was sorry, glad for a second chance and would be leaving custody with the intention of living a less unstable life, the latter of which being a significant departure from most of her experiences.
The court heard that Ratcliffe’s mental health was in steep decline on May 27 when she embarked on a long walk north.
A week earlier, she had been evicted from her Kelowna residence of two years, Gordon’s Place, a Canadian Mental Health Services building that offers a variety of social supports.
“One of the things that led to her being asked to leave the house was she had apparently been doing drugs and had started a fire in the suite of her residence and had left, leaving the fire burning, therefore putting other people in that residence in danger,” Leven said.
When she left her home with one of her cats in tow, she went to another shelter where she stayed for one night before moving on.
“It appears that she made her way from West Kelowna, then to the Armstrong area pushing a shopping cart. And it’s noted that she walked approximately 90 km, pushing that shopping cart and had no money,” Leven said.
RCMP spoke with her, but she wasn’t apprehended, and she carried on her way to Enderby, where she sparked the fire.
Drugs overtook Ratcliffe’s life at that moment. She had been using methamphetamine in the lead-up to the fires starting, and had a long history with everything from heroin to marijuana, but it’s just one part of a history fraught with mental health issues and abuse, Leven said.
“She’s had a lifelong history of neglect, abuse, trauma, and (a) pattern of addiction,” he said.
The pre-sentencing report and the psychiatric reports indicate that Ratcliffe had parents who were abusive, and she was on the streets at age 15.
That said, she had no criminal history until 2015, when she was first convicted of an assault in Kelowna, along with a few more issues in 2016. But until the fires earlier this year, there was nothing else.
This, Leven said, is evidence that she’s able to do well in a supportive environment when she’s able to steer clear of drugs.
During her time in custody, Ratcliffe made some commitments to do just that.
She has registered to have a once-a-month dose of suboxone administered to her, which will be used to keep her addictions under control.
That said, Leven pointed out that “arson is a serious offence because fires do get out of control very quickly (and) cause seriously widespread damage and injury to people.”