Attempted drug store robbery nets 4-1/2-year sentence

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This article was published 19/10/2023 (1103 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

A man who attempted to rob a local Shoppers Drug Mart last year was sentenced to four and a half years behind bars.

After hearing sentencing submissions for Salvatore Salvaggio, 34, at the end of September, Judge Shauna Hewitt-Michta reserved her decision to take time to determine a sentence for the man, who had previously pleaded guilty to attempted robbery with a weapon. This month, in a written decision, Hewitt-Michta sentenced Salvaggio to a jail term just shy of the Crown’s request for five years.

In May 2022, Salvaggio went into the Victoria Avenue East Shoppers Drug Mart and demanded hydromorphone pills from pharmacy staff while he had a loaded handgun in his pocket.

Due to an error with the safe in which the pharmacy keeps the hydromorphone pills, Salvaggio left the business empty-handed and without harming any staff.

Police later found Salvaggio hiding in the bushes nearby after he fled the pharmacy, and a police dog was used to find the handgun.

At the sentencing submissions in September, Crown attorney Grant Hughes emphasized the seriousness of bringing a loaded gun into the pharmacy and asked for five years behind bars. Salvaggio’s defence lawyer, Brett Gladstone, argued for a sentence far from the Crown’s position and offered the judge three options – a two-year jail sentence, time served, or house arrest.

During his submissions, Gladstone explained that his client suffers from multiple sclerosis, which causes him to experience pain. Salvaggio did have a prescription for the drug, but once he became addicted to the powerful opioid, the prescription dose wasn’t enough.

Gladstone said that his client had made attempts at rehabilitation after his arrest – obtaining release to Morberg House, a transitional residence in Winnipeg for men struggling with addictions, homelessness, and mental health challenges. However, Salvaggio did run into trouble at the facility and faced allegations that he had broken house rules numerous times.

Hewitt-Michta did consider Salvaggio’s participation in rehabilitative programming as a factor to his credit in her decision, along with his guilty plea and lack of criminal record.

However, the judge also emphasized features of Salvaggio’s offence that made it more serious, including the fact that the gun was loaded, and he threatened violence, even if he did not wave or point the gun in the pharmacy.

“The sentence imposed must reflect the fact that the accused chose to take a loaded firearm into the pharmacy with him that night,” Hewitt-Michta wrote.

She said that had the incident been a successful robbery with a firearm, rather than an attempted robbery, Salvaggio would have been facing a mandatory minimum sentence of five years behind bars.

“This robbery only floundered because the drug safe failed to open despite the timer running down to zero – it was very close to a perfected robbery,” the judge wrote, handing Salvaggio a four-and-a-half-year sentence.

After credit for time already served, Salvaggio will spend another year and a half behind bars.

He was also sentenced to a 10-year weapons prohibition.

» gmortfield@brandonsun.com

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