Man who k!!led his girlfriend sues jail for failing to keep him safe from revenge attacks

Man who k!!led his girlfriend sues jail for failing to keep him safe from revenge attacks

Renee Neganiwina died in a fire Joseph Snelgrove set. She was 26

A Hamilton man who killed his girlfriend two years ago is suing the province, the Barton Street jail and police, claiming that authorities failed to keep him safe from revenge beatings while in custody.

Joseph Snelgrove says even after he eventually was placed in protective custody, jail guards failed to protect him from suffering that he claims was "foreseeable."

That, according to his lawsuit, was despite the fact "… that he was a white man accused of killing a native woman, whose death was being widely disseminated through the media; and that he was being put on a range containing native men."

He claims that he was exposed to even greater risk of retribution because of the "political and social climate" arising from the inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. 

Snelgrove claims in his suit that he was attacked and rendered unconscious by at least two inmates – so severely that he broke four ribs, had a concussion, needed stitches on his mouth and was hospitalized for seven days. He believes at least one of his attackers was Indigenous.       

He's suing for at least $850,000.

At the time of the jail assaults, Snelgrove had not been convicted, an important factor in the lawsuit, says his lawyer.

"As much as people or the government sometimes think that they can just warehouse and forget these people, at this stage on the [pre-trial] side they're still presumed innocent," said Snelgrove's lawyer, Michael Moon.

"They do have an obligation to keep them safe and provide them with minimal standards of treatment."

But a childhood friend of Renee Neganiwina, the woman who died, said despite any suffering Snelgrove has experienced, he still is alive and she is dead.

"He murdered my best friend, practically my sister," said Vince Jacobs. "He is lucky he is alive and breathing."

The Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, which oversees the Barton jail, declined to comment on the lawsuit while it is before the courts.

Snelgrove pleaded guilty to manslaughter in May in connection with the death of Neganiwina, in March 2015. He'd left the house they shared in anger, dousing a sofa with flammable liquid and setting it on fire.

Neganiwina died in the fire. She was 26.

Snelgrove, then 38, claims he didn't intend for her to die and that he didn't know she had taken sleeping pills along with alcohol and wouldn't hear the smoke alarm. Police had originally charged him with second-degree murder, but his guilty plea was to manslaughter.

By the time he was taken to the Hamilton-Wentworth Detention Centre on Barton Street, the fatal fire was all over the media, the lawsuit states.

He first went to the general population range at the jail, he said in his lawsuit, and "immediately began to receive retributive threats" from other inmates.