Saskatoon woman found guilty of assault in FreshCo parking lot scuffle

A woman whose violent arrest outside a Saskatoon grocery store was captured on video was found guilty of assault and theft in a June 29 provincial court decision.

The nine-minute-long video, shared widely on social media, showed a prolonged scuffle between Annette Custer and a loss prevention officer outside the 33rd Street FreshCo location in April 2021. A week later, a lawyer for the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations called on police to lay charges against the security guard for “unfairly, violently and inhumanely” arresting Custer.

The written decision from Justice Q.D. Agnew paints a different picture.

According to Custer’s own testimony, she went to the store to steal food.

“While there, she concealed a roast and other goods in her purse. She then deliberately left the store having paid for certain items, but not those concealed in her purse: those, she stole.”

The judge found the security guard, whose company was fired by Freshco after the incident, was making a legal citizen’s arrest and was entitled to use reasonable force to detain her until a police officer arrived.

“[The guard] was therefore entitled to use ‘as much force as [was] necessary’ to arrest Ms. Custer,” Justice Q.D. Agnew wrote in a June 29 decision.

Custer was under arrest, resisting, had punched the security guard in the face, dragged him to her car and tried to drive off, biting him in the process, Agnew said.

“In those circumstances, the amount of force which Mr. McMillan used verged on being insufficient to accomplish the legal ends of effecting the arrest.”

Custer suffered no injuries in the arrest, Agnew said, and she refused medical treatment when police arrived.

Agnew rejected Custer’s argument that she punched the guard out of self defense.

“Ms. Custer knew that she had stolen something from the store. She heard Mr. McMillan tell her she was under arrest,” he said.

“I simply do not believe her when she says that she thought he was ‘assaulting’ her … She did not punch him in self-defence; she punched him to attempt to get away from him and escape. There is simply no air of reality to her claim of self-defence.”

Custer’s counsel had argued her Charter rights were violated in the arrest, calling for either a stay of proceedings or a reduction in sentence.

“The fact is that Ms. Custer suffered no harm from what was, at best, an extremely minor breach of her right,” Agnew says.

“Reducing her sentence for something that was both trivial and literally inconsequential would be a remedy vastly outweighing the breach.”

She was found guilty of both theft under $5,000 and assault. She’ll be sentenced at a later date.