Less than a year after New Brunswick businessman Dennis Oland was found not guilty of murdering his multi-millionaire father, Dennis Oland’s wife applied for a restraining order, alleging her husband was subject to violence between intimate partners.
The allegations are contained in an application for an emergency response order, which Lisa Andrik-Oland completed on June 10, 2020 at a shelter for abused women in Saint John, New Brunswick.
The document, which had been protected by a publication ban until this week, includes handwritten notes alleging that Dennis Oland was a violent and angry man who was losing control and suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“I’m not sure what he will do, but he suffers from PTSD and has had many episodes where he doesn’t control his actions and becomes aggressive,” Andrik-Oland said in the document.
“It gets worse because he has less and less control. He doesn’t get a reaction from me and he can’t stand it… I’m not safe in my own home. ”
A specific allegation is included in the account of an incident that allegedly occurred during a visit to a Toronto hotel on June 8, 2018.
“People in the next room called the police,” read the notes. “Dennis used a belt to tie my hands behind my back; there was a physical altercation. ” The alleged incident happened five months before the start of Dennis Oland’s second murder trial, and Lisa Andrik-Oland said due to the upcoming trial she told police “everything is fine” .
In the same section of the document, Lisa Andrik-Oland refers to a ‘beach incident’ in September 2019, in which Dennis Oland allegedly tied her hands and feet with a rope and pulled her over a dirt road . At one point, Lisa Andrik-Oland alleges, her husband grabbed her over her shoulder and threw his head toward rocks.
“Lots of blood,” read the notes.
Dennis Oland’s attorney Bill Teed declined to comment when asked about the allegations on Tuesday.
In 2013, Oland was charged with second degree murder, two years after his 69-year-old father, Richard, was found beaten to death in his office in Saint John, New Brunswick. His skull had been shattered by the repeated blows of a weapon that had never been found.
Dennis Oland spent almost a year in prison after a jury found him guilty in 2015.
That verdict, however, was overturned on appeal in 2016. And a new trial, which ended on July 19, 2019, declared Dennis Oland not guilty as the judge ruled that crown prosecutors failed to prove their cause.
In documents released Monday, Lisa Andrik-Oland claims her husband has not lived in the matrimonial home in Rothesay, New Brunswick, since February 2020. But Lisa Andrik-Oland alleges her husband entered the home without warning on June 7, 2020 and put the woman’s belongings in the driveway in front of the house.
“Dennis continued to sit at the edge of the property to watch my movements for a few hours,” the notes say. “He monitors my movements to my mother’s house.”
Lisa Andrik-Oland also accuses her husband of sending “hate emails and texts”.
“I felt threatened,” she wrote, adding that she had called the police from inside a locked car outside the marital home on June 9, 2020. “I expressed my fear to the police, ”she wrote. “The police did not support my request to fire him.”
Lisa Andrik-Oland goes on to say that she suffers from depression and PTSD and that she is having suicidal thoughts. She has no money to pay for psychological treatment, says the prescription request.
“I have no money to go elsewhere,” she said, adding that Dennis Oland had lived nearby with his mother since the start of 2020 and had filed for divorce.
The woman says in the notes that her husband is in a bad financial situation and that she does not have the capacity to move because she has no income and is completely dependent on him.
Lisa Oland-Andrik requested a six-month restraining order that would have barred Dennis Oland from contacting or communicating with her. It would also have given him the right to occupy the marital home exclusively.
The order was issued by an emergency decision-maker on June 10, 2020.
But a judge at the New Brunswick Court of Queen’s Bench in Moncton ruled the next day that there was not enough evidence to grant the order, and she scheduled a new hearing. On July 17, 2020, the estranged couple agreed to drop the case and the order was overturned by another judge.
Chief Justice Tracey Deware has ruled that the adjudicator has no jurisdiction to impose a ban. Further, she determined that a subsequent court order supporting the ban was inappropriate because it did not conform to the basic principles of an open courtroom.
The ban was officially lifted on Monday after lawyers for Lisa Andrik-Oland dropped their appeal, according to CBC reports.
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