A Saanich man who once boasted about being the youngest killer for hire around has lost his appeal of legal proceedings, meaning he could spend as much as 20 years in custody.
Brent Van Buskirk had appealed a court decision that could effectively increase his time in custody to 17 years — four years longer than what he said was intended by the judge who sentenced him.
Van Buskirk, then 21, was tried in B.C. Supreme Court in Vancouver in 2007 for charges relating to two conspiracies: a plan to blow up a Surrey nightclub and another plan to kill a man, cut him up and put his remains in crab traps.
The trial came just two weeks after Van Buskirk pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for stalking and killing 24-year-old Ravi Nutt of Victoria in 2004.
Van Buskirk, who was 17 at the time of the killing and tried under the Youth Criminal Justice Act, was given the maximum youth sentence of 10 years for first-degree murder. After pre-trial custody was taken into account, he was to serve four years and two months in custody and four years under supervision.
He also was given sentences of seven and five years for the conspiracies to commit murder, which took place when he was 18. The conspiracy sentences were to be served concurrently, but consecutive to the murder sentence.
An estimate at the time of Van Buskirk’s 2007 sentencing put his prison time at about 12 years.
But a Federal Court ruling in 2007 combined the two portions of Van Buskirk’s murder sentence into one for the purpose of calculating his parole and statutory release dates.
As a result, he ended up with combined sentence of 17 years and two months. With pretrial custody taken into account, the effective sentence is about 20 years.
Van Buskirk appealed the overall length of his sentence, arguing that the effective length of the sentence did not fit with the intention of the trial judge, and that the methods used to calculate his parole did not fit with what the trial judge had intended.
The B.C. Court of Appeal dismissed the appeal, saying in its judgment that Van Buskirk “has amply demonstrated that he represents a grave threat to public safety.”
“The appellant was convicted of a most callous act of murder, committed for the basest of motives.”
The sentence in place is not “unduly long or harsh,” the document adds.
It says that despite a good family background, Van Buskirk murdered for profit and sought a career as a professional killer.
