BURST
A high-risk sex offender, Randall Hopley, was arrested by Vancouver police on Thursday only a few hours after he was released from prison.
Hopley was freed Thursday morning from Mission Institution on statutory release, a federal law that automatically gives conditional freedom to most prisoners after serving two-thirds of their sentence.
He was required to live at a halfway house in Vancouver, but refused to comply and left the halfway house, said the Vancouver Police Department.
A Canada-wide warrant was issued for his arrest.
Hopley had finished serving two-thirds of an 18-month jail sentence handed down last May after he pleaded guilty to breaching conditions of a long-term supervision order in 2022 and again in 2023.
Hopley skipped out of his halfway house in the Downtown Eastside in November 2023 after cutting off his ankle monitor. He spent 10 days at large before turning himself in to police.
He also pleaded guilty to breaching the conditions of the supervision order by being in the presence of children under age 16 in November 2022 when he got too close to children while visiting a library.
Hopley served a six-year prison term for the 2011 abduction of a three-year-old boy in southeastern B.C. He was released on a 10-year supervision order in 2018 and ordered to live in the halfway house.
He was also convicted in 1985 for the sexual assault of a child and was sentenced to two years behind bars and three years probation.