Robert Evans Jr. Sentenced to Three and a Half Years for Fatal Punch That Killed Sharif Rahman
Credited with nearly two years already served in Scotland and Canada, the man who pled guilty to the manslaughter of Sharif Rahman has about seven months left to serve.
Robert Evans Jr. was sentenced to three and a half years Friday for the manslaughter of Sharif Rahman, closing the criminal case into the 2023 death of the Owen Sound restaurateur — a case that drew police across two countries and reached a resolution in just under three years.
Ontario Court Justice C. Chorney delivered the sentence just after noon, accepting a joint recommendation from the Crown and defence.
He credited Evans Jr., 25, with 710 days of pre-sentence custody at the standard rate of 1.5 days for each day served — 1,065 days — against the 1,277-day term, leaving a balance of 212 days, about seven months, to serve from Friday.
Chorney also imposed a lifetime prohibition on possessing firearms and other weapons.
A judge may reject a joint submission only in narrow circumstances, Chorney told the court — where accepting it would bring the administration of justice into disrepute. Case law placed the range for a one-punch manslaughter of this kind at two years less a day to six years, he said, and he found the proposed term was not unreasonable.
Evans Jr. pleaded guilty June 5 to a single count of manslaughter. According to the agreed statement of facts, he punched Rahman once outside Rahman’s downtown restaurant, The Curry House, on the night of Aug. 17, 2023, after two members of his group left without paying a $145.43 bill.
Rahman, 44, tried to stop him leaving and confronted the men outside. Evans’ punch knocked Rahman backward; he struck his head and fractured his skull, and died a week later, on Aug. 24, 2023, leaving a wife and young daughter behind.
Reading from the agreed facts, Chorney drew the line between murder and manslaughter. “He did not mean to cause the death of Mr. Rahman, nor did he mean to cause bodily harm such that it would cause Mr. Rahman’s death,” he said, citing the Crown’s characterization of the case as “truly a one-punch case of manslaughter.”
Chorney identified several aggravating factors: that Evans Jr. threw the punch while leaving without paying, and that he fled both the scene and the country afterward. He also cited Evans Jr.’s prior U.K. record, which includes possessing an imitation firearm.
Against those, he weighed what he accepted as genuine remorse, pointing to a statement Evans Jr. read aloud in court at his June 5 plea. Chorney described Evans Jr. as “not an educated or a sophisticated man,” but said that did not diminish his moral responsibility.
Evans Jr. appeared in the glassed-in prisoner’s box in a dark blue sweater, for the first time without his father and uncle, who had stood with him at earlier appearances. No members of the Evans family — several of whom attended the men’s extradition hearings in Scotland — travelled to Canada for the sentencing.
The hearing drew local and international media, including remote attendees from BBC Scotland, CBC and CKNX. Chorney denied a request from one outlet to record and broadcast the proceeding, noting audio had been broadcast from an earlier appearance without permission.
How the case developed
For roughly the first year after Rahman’s death, Owen Sound Police Service released little about its investigation — a silence the service now says was deliberate. In an interview this week, Chief Craig Ambrose and Det. Const. Geoff Bridgeman told the Current the force had identified its suspects early and judged they posed no danger to the public because they had already left the country.
Police held back detail, Bridgeman said, to avoid alerting the men — who were in the United Kingdom, a country with an extradition relationship with Canada — out of concern they might flee somewhere beyond its reach.
The investigation strained a small service. Owen Sound recorded three homicides in six weeks in 2023, Ambrose said, and the Rahman file pulled officers off the road.
The service logged about 85 tips from the community and roughly 70 more submitted anonymously, and reviewed thousands of hours of video; the completed file runs to about eight terabytes, most of it video, said case file manager Chevonne Martin.
Returning the men drew in Police Scotland, the RCMP, Interpol and U.K. extradition authorities alongside OSPS and the Ontario Provincial Police, which supplied a major case manager under the province’s mandatory homicide-investigation model.
Co-accused sentenced to 21 months and credited for time served
Evans Jr.’s father, Robert Busby Evans, and uncle, Barry Evans, were sentenced June 5 to time served on charges of accessory after the fact to manslaughter, after Chorney found their custody since their 2024 arrests already exceeded the 21-month terms jointly proposed.
All three men are U.K. nationals; two had entered Canada under the aliases Justin and Michael Jones. At the June 5 hearing, the two older men were to be transferred to the Canada Border Services Agency for immigration proceedings expected to lead to their deportation.
Related:
Will they be barred from returning to Canada?