Sylvio Saulnier Obituary, Death – Drug and conspiracy charges were dropped after the accused died. The trial of Sylvio Saulnier was supposed to start in Moncton next month.
Shane Magee of CBC News Thursday, conspiracy, and drug charges against Sylvio Saulnier were dropped because he had died. He was the son of a Dieppe couple whose deaths in 2019 are still being investigated. Saulnier, who was 48, was accused of having methamphetamine and cocaine with the intent to sell them and of plotting with several other people to commit a crime.
Crown prosecutor Christian Girouard told CBC News that he asked for the charges to be dropped Thursday because the RCMP told him that Saulnier had died. The charges were dropped by a judge from the New Brunswick Court of King’s Bench, which ended the case.
In response to a question about Saulnier’s death, the New Brunswick RCMP sent a statement saying that a 48-year-old man was found dead in a home on McRae Street in Campbellton on January 12. Cpl. Hans Ouellette, a spokesman for the New Brunswick RCMP, said in the statement, “At this time, police do not think that criminal activity played a role in the man’s death.” After missing court, police found At the end of February, a trial was supposed to start. Michel DesNeiges, a lawyer for Saulnier’s defense, said he quit the case at the end of last year because Saulnier didn’t show up to a pre-trial hearing. After Sauliner missed another pre-trial hearing on January 11, he was given a warrant for his arrest.
In a statement, the RCMP said that on January 12, police went to a house on McRae Street to arrest someone. The statement says that when the person didn’t answer the door, the police went into the home to check on them and found the man dead. Ouellette said that the man’s death is being looked into with the help of the coroner’s office. The RCMP raided a duplex that Saulnier owned on Dominion Street in Moncton on August 28, 2019, as part of a drug trafficking investigation called J-Trilogy. A trafficking network in the Moncton and Fredericton areas was the focus of the investigation. Jesse Todd Logue, who police said was in charge of the network, was given a prison sentence of 8 and a half years in 2021. The alleged crimes against Saulnier happened between July 4 and September 1, 2019, but he wasn’t charged until 2021.
The case has gotten a lot of attention because Saulnier’s parents, Bernard Saulnier, 78, and Rose-Marie Saulnier, 74, were found dead in their home on Dieppe’s Amirault Street on September 7, 2019, just days after the police searched the duplex he owned. So far, no one has been arrested or charged for their deaths. Ouellette said Thursday that they are still looking into how the couple died. “Investigators are actively following up on leads, including information that has come from tips from the public,” said Ouellette. “We are still asking anyone who might know something to contact the RCMP’s major crime unit in New Brunswick.”
Police have said in the past that it is too early to guess if the search of the duplex had anything to do with Bernard and Rose-Marie Saulnier’s deaths. The J-Trilogy investigation led to a number of criminal charges against both the alleged drug network and some of the officers who worked on the case. Three members of the RCMP were accused of obstructing justice when they destroyed evidence during a criminal investigation. The charges were later dropped. Last year, two of the officers went to an RCMP code of conduct hearing. At the end of the process, one officer was cleared, but the officer who admitted to deleting a 25-minute surveillance video lost 25 days’ pay. During the conduct hearing, one of the officers said that Logue’s drug network was responsible for the deaths of parents in Dieppe, but he did not say who he was talking about.