Most of the people Sean Helps victimized over an eight-month drug-fueled crime spree were Sarnia small-business owners, charities and residents.
“For example, the employee at McDonald’s who had her bicycle stolen,” assistant Crown attorney Sarah Carmody said Friday to a Sarnia judge while asking for a seven-month jail sentence. “The loss is felt more keenly by individuals and small businesses in our community, which have been hit hard by the pandemic, and then are hit hard when there’s these types of thefts.”
Helps, 31, cut the lock from a staffer’s bicycle at the Christina Street North McDonald’s at around 7:30 am on May 18, 2021. The incident was captured on camera, but the bike was never recovered.
Ten days later, he walked out of Ontario Convenience with a cigarette container and an employee’s cellphone that had been sitting on the counter. In early October, he stole more than $2,000 in tools from a storage shed at Fauld’s Motel.
On Remembrance Day, he targeted a home-building charity’s fundraising retail store.
“Habitat for Humanity had been having ongoing issues with people stealing donations left for them, such as tools, building supplies and empty bottles,” Carmody said.
A Sarnia police officer caught Helps outside the ReStore and found he had ammo, including a shotgun shell, numerous tools and knives in his backpack, along with a hatchet-hammer combo with a wooden handle.
“He wasn’t in possession of any means in which to utilize that ammunition,” defense lawyer Nick Cake pointed out.
Helps was arrested again in December with various tools while trying to hide behind a vacant house, also on London Line.
Helps, now 32, pleaded guilty Friday from the Sarnia Jail to a dozen charges ranging from breaches to possession of break-in tools to theft with a value less than $5,000 and was sentenced to seven months in jail. He’ll be released in nine days after getting credit for time already spent behind bars.
Cake said his client has had an on-again, off-again struggle with drugs over the past decade that’s reflected by his criminal record, but a family member’s death and a fentanyl addiction sparked the criminal behavior between April and December 2021.
“Mr. Helps is clearly someone who is in the throats, or was in the throats, of addiction,” the lawyer said.
Helps, though, has worked on the issue while in jail and plans to head to detox and rehab centers when he’s released in early May.
“I have a good mindset right now as to stay clean and to proceed with rehab upon release,” Helps said to the judge. “I’m just ready – I’m ready now more than ever to stay clean.”
“That would be a wise thing to do,” Justice Mark Hornblower said.
The judge also ordered probation preventing him from contacting his victims or going to their businesses, a weapons’ ban and restitution.
Other charges were withdrawn.