Amanda Vaughan
Northern News Services
Published Wednesday, November 7, 2007

YELLOWKNIFE - An 88-year-old man is facing charges of assault with a weapon after allegedly kicking his 51-year-old common-law spouse and threatening her with a large butcher knife shortly after noon on Oct. 30.

Dreilich said the RCMP responded to the couple's home on Anderson Thompson Boulevard, and the man was taken into custody.

He has since been released with an order to have no contact with the woman, who was not seriously injured in the altercation.

Lock up your snow machines

RCMP responded to the first snowmobile theft reports of the season this week. According to Const. Roxanne Dreilich from the RCMP's community policing unit, one machine was stolen from a Gitzel Street residence on Oct. 30.

There were no witnesses, but after the owner of the snowmobile discovered it missing and called the RCMP, Dreilich said they were able to track the machine for quite a distance before losing the trail.

"It being so early in the season, there was only the one set of tracks from the residence, and (the officers) were able to follow them a fair distance across the city before they disappeared into a residential area," she said.

The other incident was an attempted theft from an Old Town business, where the owner discovered signs that their snowmobile had been started, and the thief had attempted to drive it away before discovering it was chained. There are no suspects in either case.

"Residents should be using track locks, or securely chaining the machines or making them inoperable by removing the spark plugs," Dreilich said. She also advised owners of the machines to store them in a secure area, or a well-lit area.

"Anything you can do to make them more difficult to take," she added.

The terrain surrounding Yellowknife makes it an attractive place to steal the machines according to Dreilich.

"The trails and the green space make it easy to go really far in any direction," she said.

Pen not recovered

Last week's stabbing in the Gold Range Hotel was allegedly perpetrated with a pen, Dreilich told Yellowknifer.

"The victim alleged that his girlfriend used a pen, but upon investigation, there was no evidence of the weapon in the room," she said.

The stabbing took place at about 5:15 p.m. on Oct. 31, after which a witness saw the victim come out of one of the rooms in the hotel with a wound underneath his right eye, saying he had been stabbed by his girlfriend.

A woman was arrested without incident when the RCMP arrived, and there are charges of assault with a weapon pending.