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Johnston said Gervais spent 72 days in a Vietnamese jail before being transported to Toronto in February, where he was arrested on an outstanding Canada-wide warrant and returned to Calgary.

Defence counsel Alain Hepner said his client’s days in a southeast Asian jail were not a vacation.

“Food was not regular, water was not regular,” Hepner told Dinkel. “Often . . . rats and cockroaches infest(ed) a large portion of the prison.

“Sometimes the electricity would go out and they’d be without food and water for several days,” Hepner said. “It makes the Calgary Remand Centre look like a Holiday Inn.”

But Dinkel wasn’t particularly sympathetic to Gervais’ plight.

“He runs the risk of being placed in that type of incarceration by fleeing to that country,” the judge said.

“He’s the master of his own demise there.”

Johnston asked for a sentence of 18 months; the maximum sentence for the charge Gervais admitted to — breaching his curfew — is two years. Meanwhile, Hepner suggested something in the range of nine to 12 months.

Dinkel agreed 18 months would have been appropriate if not for the offender’s guilty plea and relative youth.

Instead he said a 15-month jail term was proper, minus credit to Gervais for time spent in custody in both Vietnam and Canada.

That leaves him with 200 days left to serve, the judge said.

Dinkel noted Gervais left a wake of victims behind him in his decision to flee, from Strasser-Hird’s family, who must endure another trial, to his own father.