Earl Edward Egerdeen is a predator who “trolled” for a victim and then groomed her to satisfy his own needs without regard to the harm she continues to suffer, says a Court of Queen’s Bench justice.
In Red Deer on Tuesday, Justice Juliana Topolniski sentenced Egerdeen, 43, to seven and a half years in prison, minus one year of pre-trial custody, for a series of sexual offences he committed against a teenaged girl in the late spring and early summer of 2011.
Represented by defence counsel Denis Huot, Egerdeen pleaded guilty on Monday to a series of sexual offences, including sexual interference, luring and making child pornography, starting in April 2011, when he invited her to become friends on Facebook, a social media website.
The relationship ended on July 8, 2011, when the victim’s counsellor became aware of what had been going on, Topolniski said while pronouncing her sentence.
Egerdeen knew his victim was only 14 and vulnerable, that she had few friends and that she was being bullied at school, she said.
“All of these offences are major sexual offences and their circumstances are pernicious.
“The offender hunted his victim, he groomed her and he abused her without any regard for anybody but himself.”
Topolniski said Egerdeen’s guilty plea is a factor in his favour, but that it does not stack up well against the many factors stacked against him, including previous convictions for sexual interference involving two other children.
Egerdeen, who has lived in Red Deer for most of his life, is currently serving a two-year sentence, pronounced in June of 2013, for entering a woman’s bedroom and making uninvited sexual advances while she slept in 2007.
In answer to a request from the defence, Topolniski said she could not legally make his new sentence concurrent with the existing sentence — and even if she could, she wouldn’t.
Particularly aggravating is that the man had unprotected sex with a vulnerable child, exposing her to potential for disease and pregnancy, and that he made her take explicit pictures of herself, she said.
“The pornographic images will hang over the victim’s head as a lasting, cruel form of degradation, remembered for life.”
Topolniski said she found the sentence jointly recommended by Huot and special prosecutor Aurelie Beland to be reasonable, albeit at the lower end of the scale for similar offences.
Along with the prison term, Egerdeen must submit a sample of his DNA for the national database and his name will be placed for life on the Sex Offenders Information Registry. He is banned for 20 years from using the Internet and from having unsupervised contact with children under 16.
Beland withdrew six additional charges, including sex assault, once sentencing was completed on the charges to which Egerdeen had entered his guilty plea.
bkossowan@www.reddeeradvocate.com