A B.C. man has been sentenced to life in prison for the murder of a rival drug dealer in northern B.C. more than a decade ago, with no chance of parole for 25 years.
Darren Sundman, 43, was sentenced this week for the January 2015 killing of Jordan McLeod along a snowy forest service road near Prince George, and leaving his body to be discovered two months later, in March.
Sundman was first found guilty of the killing of 2018 but the case faced several delays, including an appeal process that made its way to Canada’s highest court, the Supreme Court of Canada, in 2022.
Family members of McLeod described the impact the delays had on their lives in victim impact statements delivered in a court room as Sundman listened via video conference.
“This tragedy did not just take Jordan from us, it destroyed our family,” cousin Natalie Lawrence said Monday, Aug. 18.
“My family has been irreparably fractured and none of us will ever be the same.”
“Mr. Sundman’s moral culpability is very high,” Justice Marguerite H. Church stated in delivering her sentence, stating that he “brutally murdered Jordan McLeod” while he was confined in a “prolonged and deliberate manner.”
Sundman will be allowed to apply to have his time without parole reduced after serving 15 years, Church said, but warned it would be a high bar to meet. Nor, she said, would he automatically be allowed to apply for parole after 25 years.
According to a previous statement of facts published by the Supreme Court of Canada, Sundman — who was 32 or 33 at the time of the offence — and McLeod, who was 24, were both drug dealers “with a mutual animosity,” operating in the Vanderhoof area, west of Prince George.
On Jan. 16, 2015, Sundman, along with his brother Kurtis, trapped McLeod in a truck, which was also occupied by Sundman’s girlfriend Staci Stevenson and another accomplice, Sebastien Martin. Both the Sundmans had handguns while Martin had a shotgun and McLeod was unarmed.
While driving between Prince George and Vanderhoof, the court found, Sundman repeatedly hit McLeod in the head with his handgun while his brother egged him on and drove the truck fast enough that McLeod would not be able to escape.
“The appellant [Sundman] was angry with Mr. McLeod for many reasons,” the ruling reads. “He suspected that Mr. McLeod was having a relationship with Ms. Stevenson; Mr. McLeod was encroaching on the Sundman brothers’ turf by supplying drugs to the Vanderhoof market; the Sundman brothers owed a drug debt to Mr. McLeod and he was pressuring them to repay the debt; and the appellant had seen messages on Mr. McLeod’s phone that had upset him.”
As the truck traveled east of Prince George past Purden Lake, Kurtis Sundman slowed the truck to make a turn and McLeod jumped out, fleeing “through deep snow, across a shallow ditch and barbed wire fence, towards the bush,” the 2022 ruling says. Sundman fired his gun at McLeod “at least four times” and hit him three times, before a fatal shot was fired by Martin.
The three men then loaded McLeod’s body into their truck and drove west of Prince George, where they hid the body in the foliage along Kaykay Forest Service Road, where it would be found later that year by police, with the assistance of Stevenson.
In 2018, Kurtin Sundman was found guilty of manslaughter, while both Martin and Darren Sundman were found guilty of second-degree murder.
Crown prosecutors initially charged Sundman with first-degree murder, which is typically reserved for cases where a killing is both planned and deliberate, or when it is committed at the same time as another serious offence, which the Crown argued in this case was the forcible confinement of McLeod.
However, the initial 2018 ruling found that McLeod’s killing was not planned in advance. Additionally, the judge found that because McLeod had managed to escape prior to being killed, he was no longer forcibly confined and the first-degree murder charge did not apply.
The Crown appealed the case, arguing that because McLeod was on an isolated forest road with little option for escape when he was shot, he should still be considered confined at the time of the killing. The B.C. Court of Appeal agreed and convicted Sundman of first-degree murder, a decision that was upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada.
“Even though [McLeod] was not physically restrained outside the truck, he continued to be coercively restrained through violence, fear, and intimidation,” Justice Mahmud Jamal wrote in that 2022 decision.
Sundman’s sentencing was further delayed because of another case currently making its way through the courts. While the minimum sentence for first-degree murder is 25 years in prison with no chance of parole, the constitutionality of the practice of treating all first-degree murderers the same is being challenged.
Justice Church said the prolonged nature of the trial had further added to the anguish of McLeod’s friends and family, with their pain still “as keenly felt today,” as it was more than 10 years ago.
Sundman, appearing virtually from where he is being held in the Stony Mountain institution in Manitoba, represented himself during the sentencing, having gone through “at least” four lawyers over the course of the past decade.
He accused the judge, prosecutors, past lawyers and others of being biased against him, claiming his conviction had relied on false testimony from his former girlfriend.
While he did not deny his role in McLeod’s confinement, he said the charge of first-degree murder should not hold because he was not the person who fired the fatal bullet. That, he said, was done by Martin, who is serving a lesser sentence, which Sundman felt was unfair.
The decision to charge him with first-degree murder based on the argument that McLeod was confined while fleeing, he said, were a “hail Mary,” which proved the legal system had gone to “extreme lengths to single me out,” and he demanded either a reduced sentence or a retrial.
To that, Justice Church said it was clear Sundman “continues to struggle to understand or accept the findings” of both the provincial and federal courts which had upheld his convictions and that his “outrageous” comments showcased a misunderstanding of the legal system.
Sundman entered statements from his mother and son into the record, which were not read allowed, but which he said showed that there were also victims as the result of his imprisonment.
He did not, however, deny that he deserved some punishment for what he had done to McLeod.
“I hate myself,” he said, apologizing to the family.
