COVID delays sentencing in body-in-freezer murder trial

COVID delays sentencing in body in freezer murder trial

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.

  1. The first-degree murder trial of Chad Reu-Waters began May 24, 2022, in St. Thomas.  Reu-Waters is charged in the death of Ashley Pereira, a 33-year-old man who vanished in 2002. (Charles Vincent, The London Free Press)

    Man found guilty of second-degree murder in body-in-freezer trial

  2. Police vehicles block Lakeshore Line east of Port Burwell Tuesday, May 7, 2019, after a body and a refrigerator was discovered on a nearby Lake Erie beach at the base of a bluff.  Derek Ruttan/The London Free Press

    Man charged with first-degree murder in Port Burwell body case

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.

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