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KEITH PARKS was one of nine local runners competing in the Boston Marathon on Monday.
COLUMNIST Maxine DeHart has news on changes to the Malibu Marine boat franchise and a new department unveiling for The Bay store.
UBCO converts its arts department into a massive installation to showcase the art of its graduating students.
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THURSDAY April 18, 2013 The Central Okanagan’s Best-Read Newspaper www.kelownacapnews.com
▼ OUTDOORS
Public must add private property to Myra Bellevue Park Judie Steeves STAFF REPORTER
courthouse, her daughter’s friends and supporters behind.
▼ COURT
Family not feeling ‘Justice for Ashlee’ CONTRIBUTOR
More than 90 people, many wearing pins saying “Justice for Ashlee,” gathered in a Kelowna courtroom Wednesday to hear Justice Geoffrey Barrow sentence Ashlee Hyatt’s killer to nine months in jail and another 27 months under conditions in the community. He had initially given the girl, who was convicted of manslaughter in November, more time under conditions in the community, but had to rescind it be-
cause it exceeded the three year maximum for youth sentences. “It’s not enough,” said Ashlee’s dad, Greg Hyatt, outside court. “I think he could have given her more time in custody.” “It could be worse,” said mom Charrie Hyatt. “We got the maximum we were allowed in our Canadian justice system. So I guess I should be happy.” Ashlee Hyatt, 16, was fatally wounded by another 16-year-old girl at a drunken house party in Peachland on June 2, 2010. Hyatt and another girl, the court heard, believed the youth,
who cannot be named, had cheated on her boyfriend and confronted her. The confrontation became physical and at one point the girl said “I’ll stab you” to Hyatt. Soon after, Hyatt was wounded twice in the head area. The second wound, which severed an artery, proved fatal. Barrow found that the act was not premeditated or planned and that the knife used in the stabbing had come from the house where the party was held. “I cannot believe this was started by a stupid, immature
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argument,” the youth told the court during the sentencing hearing. “I deeply regret…the choices I made,” she said. “My remorse is incurable and will never leave me. My life is filled with sadness and regret.” “I’m so sorry for that night and the damage I caused…I wish I was the one that died,” she said. For the Hyatt family, those words did not ring true, with Charrie calling it a “fake
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Cheryl Wierda
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JENNIFER SMITH/CAPITAL NEWS
ASHLEE HYATT’S mother, Charrie Hyatt, touches her heart-shaped locket as she speaks with reporters from the steps of the Kelowna
McCurdy Rd.
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Delicate Spring Beauties dot the hillside alongside the trail and there’s the sound of water murmuring through the grass on its way into a nearby pond and wetland. Tall firs and pines dot the field and grow thicker up the hill, but there are also darkened spires where the Okanagan Mountain Park wildfire of 2003 swept through this part of Myra Bellevue Provincial Park. Although this wetland, fed by Peterson Brook and Hachey Creek, has been treated as part of the park, complete with several major trails crossing through it, it’s not actually owned by B.C. Parks. In fact, there’s a total of 40 acres that’s almost entirely surrounded by the park that’s actually private land, and, with construction of a couple of subdivisions adjacent to the park in recent years, any access it might once have had is now gone. Isabel Pritchard lives nearby and has for the past 40 years, but she’s been going into the area that is now park since she first moved to Kelowna in the mid-1960s. She rides her horses there and has even helped to build some of the trails as part of her involvement with the Friends of the South Slopes. That group of volunteers has an agreement with B.C. Parks for management of the lower slopes of the 7,829-hectare rambling park, created out of the Land and Resource Management Plan for the Okanagan, a process that was completed in 2000. Pritchard is concerned that the property’s owner, a numbered company that purchased it in 2006, now wishes to develop the property. She says as long as the previous owner had it, there were no structures built on the property or activity on it, so it was managed as part of the park. When Myra-Bellevue was created, she said FOSS tried to contact the owner, but there was never any response.
★ Leathead Rd. Hwy 33w