Justice Mark Hornblower has been on the bench since 1999.
Justice Mark Hornblower has been on the bench since 1999.
Over those 23 years, the Sarnia judge has heard countless promises from offenders about their plans to rehabilitate themselves.
“I have rarely ever seen a person so committed to their rehabilitation,” Hornblower said earlier this week.
The person he was talking about was Timothy Noj. The 34-year-old Sarnia resident pleaded guilty in late March to manslaughter linked to the Jan. 9, 2021, death of Luis Hernandez following what Sarnia police called a severe assault at a Confederation Street townhouse complex. Through an agreed statement of facts, Noj admitted to slicing the 26-year-old former St. Clair high school and Lambton College student’s throat with a knife amid a dispute over a drug debt, leaving Hernandez’s mother heartbroken.
Hornblower said the statement Aydive Martinez gave the court last month was integral to the sentencing process, which took eight months to finish, and pointed to the family’s profound loss. The judge, however, also listed more than a dozen things Noj has done since the deadly incident to turn his drug-riddled life around, including a commitment to sobriety, repairing his relationship with his family, finishing his high school diploma, getting a full -time job, turning to the Bible, and embracing his Indigenous roots.
They all factored into the judge’s decision to impose a time-served jail sentence – the Serpent River First Nation member, adopted by a Sarnia family as a toddler, had just shy of two years of credit in pre-sentence custody – and three years of probation.
“I acknowledge that this sentence is at the low end of the range, but I do not believe there could be any society benefit to an additional period of incarceration in light of the significant steps of rehabilitation taken by Mr. Noj entirely of his own initiative ,” Hornblower said.
Hernandez’s mother was not in court this week to hear the decision.
Defense lawyer Neil Rooke previously suggested a suspended sentence and three years of probation or two months of house arrest combined with the 22 months credit. Assistant Crown attorney David Nicol had asked for two more years in jail on top of the nearly two years Noj has already served.
There is no minimum sentence for manslaughter in Canada, but it can reach life imprisonment.
Noj’s about-face was well underway by January, when he was sentenced to 39 days in jail for a string of unrelated crimes linked to drug-addiction issues. A key driver in his ongoing sobriety, Rooke has said, is his client’s remorse for what he did to his friend while they were intoxicated that night.
Hernandez, a native of Colombia who moved with his family to Sarnia in the early 2000s, and Noj were both at Noj’s girlfriend’s home inside the south Sarnia complex that Saturday. The trio was using fentanyl. Hernandez fell asleep, but was woken by the woman pleading for help as Noj had overdosed in a bathroom.
After putting him in the bathtub, Hernandez and the woman gave Noj three shots of the overdose-reversing drug Narcan while Hernandez also struck him on the head multiple times. Noj, unconscious for several minutes, eventually woke up.
That’s when Hernandez became upset and accused Noj of stealing his drugs. Hernandez hit Noj with a baton multiple times while demanding he pay him back and knocked him unconscious again with a pair of blows to the head.
After Noj woke up a second time, he called his stepfather and asked for some money to help repay the debt. In the meantime, Hernandez turned his attention to the woman. He made a call trying to recruit someone to beat her up and force repayment, but eventually decided to take matters into his own hands.
As he approached her in the main bedroom, Noj jumped on top of him from behind. The pair fell to the floor, smashing a shoe rack, while Noj grabbed a knife that was on the ground and swung it towards Hernandez.
It sliced his throat. The woman tried to help Hernandez amid the severe blood loss and called police around 5:30 pm He was taken to hospital and pronounced dead 30 minutes later.
Noj, who hid in the basement as police arrived, was initially detained as a person of interest. He was also taken to hospital for treatment of his injuries but was released from custody later that night.
Following an extensive interview with the woman, police arrested Noj at a local motel three days later and charged him with second-degree murder. However, he was ordered to stand trial on the reduced charge of manslaughter following a preliminary inquiry.
Noj was released on $25,000 bail following his guilty plea in March and ordered to live with his parents, whom he had a strained relationship with before embracing sobriety, under strict house arrest with GPS tracking. That release order is now over, but his new three-year probation order features various rules, including bans on illicit drugs, alcohol, weapons, contacting Hernandez’s family members or his ex-girlfriend, or coming to Lambton County unless he has written permission from his probation officer.
This was the first of four Sarnia homicide investigations in just a three-week stretch in January 2021 that set the city on edge and prompted police to issue a caution for residents to lock windows and doors.