Sexual assault case against local teacher dropped 

Update, October 14th, 4 p.m.: A previous version of this story included erroneous information about a ‘voir dire’ hearing after Neufeld’s case had been dismissed. Energeticcity.ca is happy to set the record straight.

FORT ST. JOHN, B.C. — A sexual assault case against a local teacher has been dismissed due to a violation of his right to a timely trial.

Jerad Neufeld — a teacher at Upper Pine Elementary and Junior Secondary School — was accused of sexual assault in June 2022.

In early October 2025, Neufeld applied for a ‘Jordan application,’ requesting the case be thrown out due to excessive delay. His trial, which was scheduled for October 27th, would have been anticipated to end nearly 1,200 days after he was initially charged.

In a supreme court decision dated October 3rd, Supreme Court Justice David Crerar granted the application and declared Neufeld’s right had been breached, issuing a stay of proceedings for all charges.

Initially, Neufeld was charged with one count of sexual assault, based on “an alleged incident or incidents of sexual assault, occurring over a 27-month span,” according to the decision.

The matter proceeded in the provincial court from August 2022 until June 2025, when the Crown filed a direct indictment and the matter was transferred to the Supreme Court.

According to Crerar, during that nearly three-year time frame both the provincial court and the defence pressed the Crown on the ambiguity of the charge, requesting more details regarding “which, if any or all of the allegations, and which, if any, of the eight or so different manners of sexual assault described in the police report” formed the charge’s basis.

The main focus of provincial court proceedings were two applications from the defence to present 452 pages of communications between Neufeld and his accuser — whose identity is protected under a publication ban — about sexual activity.

“Those documents indicate that throughout the period the [pair] was actively and regularly engaged in consensual sexual activity, some of which involved mutual language and activities that could objectively be considered as violent,” Crerar said in the decision.

“In arguing for their relevance, the accused noted that there was no reference to any of the alleged sexual assaults in the nearly daily communications over the relevant period. The materials and the application scheduled to be heard by this court are largely identical to those considered by the provincial court.”

Neither of the two hearings for those applications ever reportedly concluded, but in January 2024, it was ruled that all but one of the documents could proceed to the second stage of the inquiry.

Midway through that second-stage hearing and 22 months into the prosecution process overall, on June 20th, 2024, the Crown changed its filing to include three charges in response to complaints about ambiguity.

Neufeld was now facing one count of sexual assault and two counts of sexual assault involving choking and bodily harm. These new charges changed the maximum penalty that could be issued to Neufeld and meant he was entitled to a preliminary inquiry.

He also had a right to re-elect his mode of trial, meaning he could choose whether he wished to be tried by a provincial court judge with no jury or preliminary inquiry, or by a supreme court judge, with or without a jury and with the option for a preliminary inquiry.

However, the court failed to inform Neufeld and have him re-elect his mode of trial until March 6th, 2025, when the defence raised the issue. 

This also means the provincial court didn’t actually have jurisdiction over the proceedings between June 20th, 2024 and March 6th, 2025, so any trial held in that time frame would have been a nullity. 

According to Crerar, “everyone wholly overlooked the necessity of putting [Neufeld] to his election” after the charges were changed, assuming that his initial election would simply “roll over.” Multiple attempts were made to schedule a provincial court trial during that timeframe but they were all adjourned or cancelled after March 6th.

“This relatively simple case could and should have been completed within 18 months, had the Crown provided sufficient clarity of the allegations facing the accused, which it possessed at the outset, from the outset, instead of setting forth a chain of delay through its three-count information, with increased jeopardy and change of trial court and trial modality, 22 months into the prosecution,” Crerar said.