Bay Bulls father, 81, sentenced for assaulting children 50 years ago
A Bay Bulls man who beat his son and burned his daughter more than 50 years ago has been sentenced to 16 months house arrest for what the judge hearing the case called "egregious" offences.
Walter Welyhorski, 81, was convicted of three assaults after a trial in March 2016, and sentencing was handed down Friday in the Supreme Court of Newfoundland.
According to the facts presented during sentencing, Welyhorski assaulted his son three times between October 1964 and July 1971.
The initial assault, when the boy was nine or 10, involved an "excessive" beating and the boy tried to hide under a neighbour's step after he was forced out of the house naked by his father.
Welyhorksi was convicted of assaulting his daughter when she was five or six by having her hand forced upon a hot stove and burned, as punishment for taking money from her mother's purse.
According to court documents, the mother placed her daughter's hand on the stove, at her husband's command.
When the girl was 12, the court found, Welyhorski pulled her hair out of her head, so that he had to comb her hair to hide the injury.
'No more secrets'
In a victim impact statement, the daughter wrote that while her father was a good provider, "Abuse was a regular occurrence in our home. Mental, physical and emotional abuse!"
She went on to describe the reason she came forward decades later.
"I don't want anymore SECRETS!" she wrote. "I NEED to tell what happened! I NEED to let go....My father needed to realize that what he did was WRONG!!!"
In handing down his decision, Judge Carl Thompson said Welyhorski abused a position of trust.
"The offender appears to have believed he was entitled to effect discipline ... He somehow felt authorized morally to effect the inflictions he did," wrote Thompson. "The consequence to these children is immeasurable."
However, Thompson said Welyhorski, who denied assaulting his children, is not a risk to the community and because the children live outside the province, not a risk to reoffend.
The accused, who worked as an RCMP officer in Ottawa and St. John's in the 1950s, and then as a financial planner, settled in the Bay Bulls area where he and his wife operated a gas station, convenience store and takeout.
She passed away recently.
Welyhorski now lives alone in his home and Thompson ruled that he will spend 16 months confined to the house, except for medical appointments and approved errands such as grocery shopping.
He is also forbidden from contacting his son or daughter and will be on probation for another six months after serving the house arrest.
Welyhorski is already on probation for a 2015 conviction of assault with a weapon against his wife, but Thompson said the charges involving his children predate that and have to be treated as a first offence.
Thompson called the case a "tragedy."
He said jail would add little to the denunciation of an already isolated man.
"He has nothing remaining to which he can connect as family. In my view, he has, by his own actions and at his own hand, severed his family relationship and now in the later years of his life is sentenced to loneliness and emptiness."
