Calgary resident Keith Gall, confined to a wheelchair with multiple sclerosis, was viciously attacked and robbed Friday morning in his home, losing all of the medical cannabis he grows to help with his illness.
Gall, who could also be potentially evicted from his house by the provincial government that wants to shut down his legal home grow, was tied up and beaten by four men who broke into his home in the early hours of Feb. 26.
The homeowner spent yesterday afternoon at the police station talking to the Calgary gang unit and, while he got some of his possessions back, most if it was either destroyed or lost. All his plant matter was gone and Gall also lost roughly $1,000 in cash, with bills destroyed in the assailants’ garburator
“They showed me a bag of sticks and stuff like that and said ‘is this yours?’ and I said ‘I don’t know,” said Gall. “They stripped everything off of it, all of the dried stuff was all gone. They don’t know what happened to it.”
Gall said his face is still sore from the beating he took.
“They kept smacking me across the lips with a billy-club or something when I told them something they didn’t want to hear,” he said, but mentioned that his roommate, Darryl, was in much worse shape.
“They needed to keep him down so they used a bat on him,” Gall said. “They hit his ankle in and his elbow in, he said he probably has to go in and get surgery.”
Gall said he has no idea how or why he was targeted by his assailants, even though he’s been written about in the past, his address has never been published and he’s not sure where the criminals got his information.
Gall suspected that it was the attention from Alberta Health, that labelled his small medical grow as an “intense grow operation” in his ongoing battle for his property, that lured the assailants to the house.
“The wind went out of their sails when they figured out there was nothing really downstairs for them,” Gall remembered. “There were 40 plants that were just about ready, but they were still about two weeks away and had quite a bit of filling out to do. They didn’t get much out of that.”
After the men, dressed in all-black clothes and masks, chopped down what they could, they held Gall down and demanded he give them $50,000 they had been (wrongly) told he kept in the home.
“They said they were going to cut my fingers off and Darryl’s fingers off one at a time until they got $50,000 — $5,000 a finger,” Gall said. “They searched everywhere, they tore the whole house apart, even in the cat’s bed, everywhere they could and couldn’t find nothing.”
Even with the recent Allard decision that has allowed the protection of medical home growers, Gall said he expects his recent victimization to be used against him.
“Now they’re going to come along and say I’m a danger in the neighbourhood – that’s exactly what they’re looking for,” Gall speculated.
For now, the home-owner is trying to raise funds to add improved security features to his home, including cameras, better alarm systems and motion sensor lights. While the retired Gall is on a fixed liability income, Cannabis Growers of Canada has started a fundraiser, looking for $3,000 to make the necessary modifications to Gall’s home and hopefully provide him with some peace of mind.
“You kind of wonder what’s going on outside, every time you hear noise at night,” Gall said.