B.C. woman sentenced to 18 months probation for coughing at grocery employee during pandemic

A Save-On-Foods sign, Cambie Street, Vancouver, June 17, 2015. THE CANADIAN PRESS IMAGES/Bayne Stanley

A British Columbia judge has sentenced a Vancouver Island woman to 18 months of probation for deliberately coughing in the face of a grocery store employee and shoving her shopping cart into another worker during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Judge Barbara Flewelling found Kimberly Brenda Woolman guilty in April of assaulting the employees and causing a disturbance at the Save-On-Foods in Campbell River.

The incident occurred three years prior, on April 24, 2020, when provincial health orders required stores to limit the number of customers allowed inside and required shoppers to stay at least two metres apart.

Five store employees provided first-hand evidence during the three-day trial, testifying that Woolman refused to follow the store's COVID-19 mitigation measures, refused to leave the store when asked, and shouted "loud invective that COVID-19 was fake," the judge wrote in her decision on July 19.

Employee Jacqueline Poulton told the court she was following Woolman down a store aisle and asking her to leave when Woolman stopped abruptly, turned to face her from about a metre away and then leaned in to forcibly cough twice in her face.

After staff convinced Woolman to leave, employee Gordon Dawson instructed her to leave her shopping cart behind because it had unpaid items in it. Woolman refused, saying she needed the cart to walk to her car. Employees offered her an empty cart but she refused before shoving her cart into Dawson.

"Those were the very early days of the COVID 19 pandemic when scientists and medical professionals were struggling to understand how the virus was transmitted between people," Flewelling wrote.

"It was recognized that it was a respiratory virus. In those early days, there was no medication or vaccine available to cure or to reduce the severity of the infection."

'HEIGHT OF SELFISHNESS AND SELF-ENTITLEMENT'

The judge noted that while most British Columbians at that time were able to remain at home, frontline workers who provided essential services did not have that luxury.

"Those frontline workers included the people who went to work every day at Save-On-Foods so that people could buy groceries," she wrote. "Those frontline workers were the people that Ms. Woolman derided and assaulted."

The judge also noted that Woolman was similarly aggressive and rude to witnesses and to the court during her trial.

Crown prosecutors asked the judge to sentence Woolman to 18 months of probation and a $1,000 fine.

Woolman, who had no prior criminal record, told the court she was unable to pay a fine due to her limited income.

In her sentencing decision, the judge declined the recommended fine and instead imposed 18 months of probation and ordered Woolman to avoid contact with Poulton and avoid the Save-On-Foods store.

"It would have been very simple, and easy, for her to have simply complied with the reasonable and lawful request to adhere to social distancing," the judge wrote.

"Instead, she embarked on a tirade about her belief that COVID 19 was not real and was fake," she added. "It was the height of selfishness and self-entitlement."