ST. THOMAS – The sentencing in the Port Burwell freezer case has been pushed to Friday.
ST. THOMAS – The sentencing in the Port Burwell freezer case has been pushed to Friday.
Chad Reu-Waters, 48, of Jarvis, was found guilty of second-degree murder by a jury in early June in the death of Ashley Pereira, 33, a Mississauga man who was missing for 17 years. Reu-Waters was supposed to have his sentencing hearing in a St. Thomas courtroom Tuesday.
But during a brief court appearance, Justice Kirk Munroe adjourned the matter until Friday to give Reu-Waters’ defense lawyer more time to recover from COVID-19.
Instead of an in-person hearing, Munroe agreed that the Crown and defense submissions could be heard by teleconference.
Pereira’s badly decomposed body was found inside a chest freezer that had been tossed over a bluff east of Port Burwell on May 6, 2019.
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He and Reu-Waters had been business partners before his disappearance. The pair had met while they were both inmates in a Milton jail in 2001.
Following Pereira’s disappearance in March 2002, the court heard that Reu-Waters would brag about killing him to his wife and his ex-girlfriend, and would often use his claim to intimidate them and make them fearful they would be implicated.
He told them he had strangled Pereira with a wire cord in a storage unit in Guelph and put the body in the freezer, which was moved several times. Before it was tossed, it was in the basement of a Simcoe hobby shop operated by Reu-Waters’ son, Sam Waters, 26.
Waters and two friends threw the freezer off the bluff not long after visiting his father in jail and after Reu-Waters’ girlfriend had told the police about his claims.
Reu-Waters is facing a mandatory life sentence, but Munroe still has to set a parole ineligibility term ranging from 10 to 25 years.