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Convicted bank robber testifies in Kalmikoff trial

Andrew Stevenson says he has no memory of the robberies he is convicted of.
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Kalmikoff says she didn't know Stevenson was committing robberies

Convicted bank robber Andrew Stevenson appeared Monday in Supreme Court in Nelson as a witness for the defence of Krista Kalmikoff, who is on trial in connection with a spate of West Kootenay robberies in the spring of 2014. Kalmikoff and Stevenson were living together during the period of the robberies.

Kalmikoff’s defence has been based on her contention that she didn’t know Stevenson was committing crimes as she waited for him in the car during the robberies of the Nelson and District Credit Union and the Kootenay Currency Exchange.

Stevenson pled guilty to his part in the robberies earlier this year and is serving a 10-year jail sentence.

In court on Monday, under examination by Kalmikoff’s lawyer, Blair Suffredine, Stevenson said he didn’t tell Kalmikoff, with whom he was living at the time, about the robberies. He also said he didn’t remember the robberies.

“With the amount of drugs I was using, I don’t remember them,” he said. “I didn’t remember one day from another half the time.”

He said that on April 25, the date of the Nelson credit union robbery, he left Kalmikoff to go shopping and asked her to meet him in the parking lot at the Real Canadian Wholesale Club.

“She did not know what I was going to do,” he said.

Stevenson said Kalmikoff didn’t know about the robberies but did know he was buying and selling pills almost daily, which included selling prescription oxycontin to buy street morphine.

Under cross examination by Crown counsel Sunday Patola, Stevenson explained he’d been addicted to morphine and oxycontin since he was a teenager after getting rheumatoid arthritis at age 12, and that during the period of the robberies was injecting 300 millilitres of morphine (prescription and black market pills which he cooked for injection) every day.

His daily routine, he said, was to shop for pills on the street every morning and get high the rest of the day. Stevenson said not only did he not remember the robberies, he had no memory of planning them, of using a sawed-off shotgun, of whether the shotgun was kept in the house, or whether Kalmikoff confronted him about the shotgun which, according to her testimony last week, was kept for some time in the bedroom closet. He didn’t remember when the couple moved from Salmo to Slocan.

He also said he didn’t remember how much money he gained from the robberies or what he spent it on. And he said he remembers neither running back to the car in the parking lot from the robbery nor the subsequent car chase to the Kootenay Canal. He said he has some memory of the police chase once they reached the Kootenay Canal, and of jumping off the bridge to escape the police.

Given his bad memory, Patola wondered how he could be certain that Kalmikoff was unaware of his activities.

“You said she did not know [you were committing robberies], but you really don’t know if she did or not, because of your memory,” Patola charged.

“That is a fair assumption,” Stevenson replied.

“You can’t know what she knew.”

“That’s right.”

Stevenson’s was the final evidence in the trial. Final summations to the jury will take place on Tuesday.



Bill Metcalfe

About the Author: Bill Metcalfe

I have lived in Nelson since 1994 and worked as a reporter at the Nelson Star since 2015.
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