York, Canada – A former York police officer has pleaded guilty and been sentenced on sexual assault and breach of trust charges, a second conviction for the Markham man in the past two years.
Former constable Young Min von Seefried was handed a 25-month prison sentence on April 5 for his behaviour on Aug. 12, 2014, when he stopped the vehicle of a married couple he’d observed leaving a karaoke bar at Steeles Ave. and Putnam Gate in Markham.
After pulling over the vehicle, von Seefried smelled alcohol and asked for the male driver’s and female passenger’s ID, telling her she looked “very lovely,” the court heard.
Von Seefried followed the couple home, saying he wanted to ensure they were safe.
Once there, he told the man to head inside and began speaking to the woman and asked her to have a cigarette with him.
Von Seefried suggested they go into a laneway between the houses to avoid the rain, at which point he grabbed her and kissed her.
Despite her limited English, she pushed him away and said: “No, why?”
“He then said something (the victim) interpreted to mean he wanted to have sex,” the agreed statement of facts reads.
He reached in her shirt and touched her breast, placed her hand on his erect penis and despite the victim saying “No” more than once, had sex with her.
“She was frightened … she did not call the police at the time because she felt that the police would not believe her,” Crown attorney Jason Nicol told the court.
When she told her husband a week later it caused serious problems in their marriage, the court heard.
Over a number of subsequent weeks von Seefried tried to locate the woman, speaking to acquaintances and checking the Ministry of Transport database, attempting to get her phone number and current address.
A month later, the victim and her husband moved to another address and she got a new driver’s licence with a fake address in an attempt to shake von Seefried.
Despite this, he obtained the woman’s number from her husband and called her three or four times.
She agreed to meet with him and he went to her home in the fall, this time in plain clothes.
The victim agreed to have sex with von Seefried “so he would not bother her anymore.”
“She told him it would be the last time in the hope that he would not contact her again,” the statement reads. “She was also scared because despite her attempts to avoid him he had located her.”
She told police of the events in November 2016 during an SIU investigation.
In her victim impact statement, read to the court by Nicol, the complainant said this incident caused the breakdown of her marriage and has ruined a number of relationships since.
“I cry myself to sleep, I wake up crying, I have been suicidal,” she wrote through an interpreter. “I don’t feel human. I feel like a zombie, my soul has left me. I feel helpless and useless. I feel utterly alone … I want to put a wall around me.”
She said every time she has intercourse now she feels so dirty that she has to wash herself after until her “skin is red.”
When asked by Justice David Rose why he had committed the acts, von Seefried’s lawyer, Ingrid Grant, said he had initially been seeking out consensual sexual relationships while on duty, before going further to non-consensual ones.
“(There was) a distorted thinking about the power imbalance of being a police officer,” she told the court, adding that were also severe issues with his thinking around consent.
A psychiatric report found that von Seefried is not a psychopath and does not have mental health issues, instead finding that he was trying to “bolster deep-rooted insecurities.”
The psychiatric report suggests von Seefried, who was adopted from a Korean orphanage as an infant, thought the victim “was into it.”
In separate letters to the court, von Seefried’s wife, with whom he has two children, said she is sticking with him and hopes to attend couple’s counselling, noting von Seefried is a good father to their children.
His parents said he was always respectful, caring and a good father. Von Seefried told psychiatrists that he believed he kissed about 20 women during traffic stops while he was an officer.
This sentence is on top of 16 months von Seefried is already serving for a separate 2015 sex assault during which he kissed, fondled a woman’s genitals and forced her to touch his erect penis also during a traffic stop in Markham.
Von Seefried left York Regional Police following his initial finding of guilt and prison sentence, charges for which he originally pleaded not guilty.