A Barrie man who almost ran down an Ontario Provincial Police officer after he was found slumped over in his vehicle while carrying both drugs and weapons last spring in Oro-Medonte has been handed a four-and-a-half-year penitentiary sentence.
Gary Hirsch, 34, maintained a stoic presence after pleading guilty to multiple counts Wednesday at the Barrie courthouse as his lawyer and the Crown worked through a global resolution that brought his case to a conclusion after almost 10 months in pre-sentence custody.
Hirsch originally faced dozens of charges and the possibility of much more jail time, but eventually pleaded guilty to weapons, impaired and breach charges. The rest of his voluminous charge sheet was withdrawn.
“This is your longest … and it’s a penitentiary sentence,” Ontario Court Madam Justice Sarah Tarcza explained in her remarks.
Her words were by turns a stern rebuke for Hirsch’s serious criminality displayed in this incident, but also in previous brushes with the law.
Hirsch was not long out of prison at the time, court heard, having served almost a year for a series of impaired and breach charges from 2023.
Still, the judge struck a hopeful tone that Hirsch could turn himself around upon release.
“Good luck,” Tarcza told Hirsch in her final remarks to him.
Court heard evidence that the OPP received an early-morning call for service on May 30, 2024, from an off-duty police officer on Ridge Road, just outside of Barrie.
Upon attending the scene, police found a man slumped over the wheel of his vehicle with a passenger also in the car. Woken from his stupor and apparently unaware that the officers had laid down a spike belt to prevent him from fleeing, Hirsch gunned it in reverse, striking one of the officers.
That officer was injured, but recovered.
A car coming in the opposite direction had to swerve to miss Hirsch’s vehicle, which was only brought to a stop when it clashed head-on with a police cruiser.
Hirsch, smelling of cannabis, was arrested after police cut his seatbelt to get him out of his vehicle.
Court heard that a subsequent search of him and his vehicle turned up a loaded handgun, switchblade knife, Canadian currency and a quantity of drugs.
Hirsch’s lawyer, Susan Pennypacker, while acknowledging most of the Crown’s evidence in the joint submission, said that her client’s fleeing was a clumsy, ill-advised reaction to being startled awake.
“He was unconscious and highly intoxicated,” Pennypacker told court. “(Driving off) was an automatic reaction.”
Pennypacker also detailed her client’s struggles with drugs.
“Drugs have taken him very far off track,” Pennypacker told court. “He told me this morning, ‘This is it, I can’t take it anymore.’”
Hirsch also received a 10-year driving prohibition order and is subject to a lifetime weapons ban.
Given enhanced credit for 294 days already spent in pre-sentenced custody, Hirsch has a little more than three years left to serve.
