PAIR SENTENCED FOR KILLING CRACK DEALER

Receive 9 1/2 Years In Prison

Two men who beat an inner-city crack cocaine dealer to death two years
ago -- they tied him up with an electrical cord and smashed a stereo
speaker over his head -- were sentenced to nine and a half years in
prison yesterday. But if Chevy Ballantyne, 19, and Walter Sanderson,
22, were upset that they'll spend some of the best years of their
lives behind bars, they didn't show it in court yesterday. Instead
they joked and giggled with friends and family during breaks and at
one point, a leg-shackled Sanderson tried to get the attention of his
two young daughters. For the most part they ignored him.

"I haven't seen them in a long time," he told a sheriff's officer.

The two pleaded guilty to manslaughter several weeks ago for their
part in beating Guy Joseph Pouliot to death Nov. 2, 2002 in the
basement of a Kate Street residence.

Ballantyne and Sanderson beat the 46-year-old, 120-pound man into
submission. The two towered over the 4-foot-10 Pouliot, smashing him
with anything they could find, including a snow shovel and curtain
rod. "Pouliot was pleading for mercy -- he was given none," Crown
attorney Zane Tessler said.

Pouliot died when his skull was cracked open. A pathologist found 100
different injuries to his head and upper body.

Tessler told Court of Queen's Bench Judge Perry Schulman that Pouliot
ran a crack den out of his dilapidated William Avenue apartment suite
that he shared with his dog. In exchange for the odd chunk of crack,
he let users and dealers use his suite to do business.

On the day he died, he kicked three of those people out. The three
went back to the Kate Street residence where Ballantyne and Sanderson
were sleeping off a drinking binge.

The owner came home and finding the three crack users in one room and
Ballantyne and Sanderson passed out in the basement, became upset at
her residence being used as a flop house.

In kicking them out, Sanderson started fighting with one of the three
men. He and Ballantyne chased them east towards Isabel Street where
they bumped into Pouliot, who was using a pay phone.

For reasons not explained in court, Sanderson and Ballantyne then
dragged Pouliot back to the Kate Street residence, where they beat him
senseless.

When he lost consciousness, the pair panicked and tried to revive him.
When that failed, they took his limp body outside and dumped it in an
alley behind an apartment building. Tessler said police made swift
work arresting Sanderson and Ballantyne as a fresh blood trail led
from Pouliot's body back to the Kate Street killing scene.

Tessler said the Crown accepted a guilty plea to manslaughter instead
of going to trial on the original second-degree murder charges.

He said there's evidence the two didn't intend to kill Pouliot and
that some of the witnesses were unreliable.

Sanderson and Ballantyne have both spent two years in pre-trial
custody so under the formula used by judges for sentencing, that
counts as four years prison time.

Schulman then tacked on an additional five and a half years, bringing
the full sentence for both to nine-and-a-half years.