B.C. woman sentenced to 18 months probation for coughing at grocery employee during pandemic

A British Columbia judge has sentenced a Vancouver Island woman to 18 months of probation for deliberately coughing in the face of a grocery store employee and shoving her shopping cart into another worker during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A British Columbia judge has sentenced a Vancouver Island woman to 18 months of probation for deliberately coughing in the face of a grocery store employee and shoving her shopping cart into another worker during the earliest days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Judge Barbara Flewelling found Kimberly Brenda Woolman guilty in April of assaulting the employees and causing a disturbance at the Save-On-Foods in Campbell River.

The incident occurred three years prior, on April 24, 2020, when provincial health orders required stores to limit the number of customers allowed inside and required shoppers to stay at least two metres apart.

Five store employees provided first-hand evidence during the three-day trial, testifying that Woolman refused to follow the store's COVID-19 mitigation measures, refused to leave the store when asked, and shouted "loud invective that COVID-19 was fake," the judge wrote in her decision on July 19.

Employee Jacqueline Poulton told the court she was following Woolman down a store aisle and asking her to leave when Woolman stopped abruptly, turned to face her from about a metre away and then leaned in to forcibly cough twice in her face.

After staff convinced Woolman to leave, employee Gordon Dawson instructed her to leave her shopping cart behind because it had unpaid items in it. Woolman refused, saying she needed the cart to walk to her car. Employees offered her an empty cart but she refused before shoving her cart into Dawson.

"Those were the very early days of the COVID 19 pandemic when scientists and medical professionals were struggling to understand how the virus was transmitted between people," Flewelling wrote.