Charlottetown man sentenced to 5 years for taking hostage during attempted jailbreak

A Charlottetown man will spend about five years in a federal prison after he attempted to break out of the Provincial Correctional Centre by holding a shard of glass to a worker's throat and taking her hostage. 

Johnathan Joseph Trainor, 29, pleaded guilty to eight charges in January and was sentenced last Friday.

All of the charges against him stemmed from incidents in the summer of 2024. 

Trainor missed a court date in June, then fled from police when they tried to arrest him in July. He was eventually caught and taken to the provincial jail on Sleepy Hollow Road.

The next day, Aug. 1, Trainor smashed a window in his cell and used a piece of glass to take an education worker hostage in the jail's library, threatening to slit her throat if she did not go with him and unlock the door. The jail was locked down during the incident.

Judge Nancy Orr sentenced Trainor to five years in a federal penitentiary on the hostage charge. He also got 15 days for failing to appear in court last June and 45 days for resisting arrest in July, for a total of five years and 60 days. 

He received 45 days for escaping custody, four months for uttering threats, six months for assault with a weapon, two months for damaging the window at the jail and six months for attempting to escape. 

Those sentences are concurrent, meaning they appear on his criminal record, but he can serve the total of 18 months and 45 days at the same time as the other, more significant sentence. He also received some credit for the time he's already served in custody. 

Trainor has to provide a DNA sample to a national database and will be banned from owning weapons for 10 years after his release. He also  is barred from contacting the jail worker he took hostage.

Lawyer fired, rehired

Trainor was represented by a legal aid attorney when he entered his guilty pleas in January. 

But at his original sentencing hearing last month, Trainor fired his lawyer, telling the court he got bad advice and didn't understand what he was admitting to when he pleaded guilty. 

Trainor told the judge he was withdrawing from opioids at the time of the jailbreak, and did not believe he was in his normal headspace.

He then asked to change his guilty pleas to not guilty, and was given time to make his case before the judge, who explained the bar for withdrawing a plea was very high.

Orr ultimately declined the request, and the eight guilty pleas remained. The judge acknowledged that his drug withdrawal was submitted as a factor in his sentencing.

Last Friday, Trainor was again represented by the legal aid lawyer he had dismissed earlier in the year.