Roy Pedwell, 26, was scheduled to go on trial April 14 in Huntsville on charges of assault, assault causing bodily harm and uttering death threats. Instead, he submitted a plea of guilty to the charge of simple assault and assistant Crown attorney Lyndsay Jeanes agreed to drop the other charges.

Reading from a prepared statements of facts, Jeanes described how, at 7 p.m. on May 19, 2007, two Italian-Canadian families consisting of two men, their wives, young children and the elderly parents of one of the adults were setting up tents on their vacant cottage lot on North Kahshe Lake Road when four drunk men began yelling obscenities at them and telling them to “get back on the boat.” Court heard the victims asked the men to leave them alone, saying they wanted no trouble and had young children with them.

Benjamin Barker, one of the attackers, pushed the two women, Jeanes said while Pedwell told them he was a professional boxer and punched the father of the children in the eye. He told the victims not to sleep because he had a 9 mm handgun and would come back later to have sex with the mother of the children.

The men then left, three of them going to a nearby cottage and the tallest of the group, a man with tattoos, going to another cottage.

The victims called the police and less than an hour after the incident, the assailants were arrested. Pedwell, identified as the tallest of the four men, told the police that the four men had been smoking crack all day. In the cruiser on the way to the Bracebridge Ontario Provincial Police detachment, the men banged their heads on the inside of the vehicle.

Two of them, James Ring and William Clement, did not take part in the assaults and pleaded guilty to breach of probation.

Benjamin Barker pleaded guilty on June 5, 2007, to charges of assault, uttering death threats and failing to comply with probation conditions. The Crown had argued for a 12-month jail term, but Justice John Evans sentenced him to nine months plus one day in jail to be followed by two years probation.

When Barker pleaded guilty, his attorney John Sharkey stated his client’s recollections of the events of that evening were clouded by alcohol, but said Barker knew nothing of a handgun.

“As your honour has heard, it appears that Mr. Barker instigated most of the trouble,” said Pedwell’s attorney Raymond Morhan, in Huntsville. Pedwell went home while the other three came back to the vacant lot and had no knowledge of a gun threat, he said. “The reason Mr. Pedwell was so upset was that the police approached him with guns drawn in front of his wife and child.”

Jeanes maintained there was no return to the scene by the three men.

“All the complainants heard the (gun) comment,” she said. “The comment was made when Mr. Pedwell was there.”

Justice George Beatty accepted the guilty plea and ordered a pre-sentence report.

Pedwell will be sentenced in Bracebridge on June 2.