All charges against the common law wife of a computer security expert involved in a G20 related case have been dropped.
Kristen Peterson was charged with explosives and weapons possession a day after her common-law husband Byron Sonne was arrested at their Forest Hill home on June 22, 2010.
Sonne, who remains in jail, faces a number of charges — the most serious of which is possession of an explosive. He also faces charges of mischief and intimidating a justice system participant.
Peterson’s lawyer Brian Heller said that he appreciated the professionalism of the police and crown attorney’s office in dropping all the charges before a trial began, in an interview with the Star outside a courtroom in the Old City Hall Courthouse.
“For us the system worked,” Heller said to the Star.
The 37-year-old Peterson, however, has been free on bail since June 26. Her bail conditions originally included living with her parents, Maureen and John Peterson, and having no contact with Sonne except in the presence of lawyers. But in the fall, the terms of her bail were relaxed and she returned to her home.
Peterson, a visual artist, was charged with possession of the ingredients needed to make an explosive device and possession of a weapon “for a dangerous purpose.”
She and her husband lived in a million dollar home on Elderwood Dr. in Forest Hill, where the 37-year-old Sonne operated his computer security company, Halvdan — which means “half-Danish” — Solutions.
The couple has been together for at least a decade and refers to each other as husband and wife, according to some. But police described their relationship as common law.
The daughter of a Toronto executive, Peterson holds English literature and Master of Visual Studies degrees from the University of Toronto and a fine art diploma from the Toronto School of Art.
Her art career so far has focused on installation work or site specific drawings on buildings, according to one biography.
One of her first permanent installations was commissioned by the Toronto Transit Commission for the St. Clair West streetcar line and was to be unveiled last year.
“My goal is to explore the underpinnings of how we both create and perceive space,” Peterson writes on her webpage.
In 2006, she was the resident artist in the Spadina Museum’s Lynn Donoghue Artist in Residence Program that is run through the city culture program. A long-time Art Gallery of Ontario docent, Peterson used windows and mirrors inside the museum to reveal hidden areas of the building near Casa Loma.
Sonne came from a very different world. He is described as “slightly nerdy with a receding hairline.” In his spare time, he liked to hang out at HackLab TO, a non-profit group for techies who delight in building everything from LED signs to computer codes.
Well-respected in his field of computer security, Sonne had previously worked for top companies such as Circle Network Security and FSC Internet Corp.
For those who know Sonne, it is his tendency for mischief that may have landed him in hot water. In high school, Sonne reportedly planted a fake bomb that resulted in his school being evacuated, causing classmates to vote him “most likely to become an international terrorist” in their yearbook, according to a former schoolmate.
Those who now know Sonne say he is a good guy with strong ethics, the farthest thing from a scheming terrorist. With the entire city tense in the lead-up to the G20 summit, Julian Dunn wonders if security officials may have over-reacted to the stunts of an “agent provocateur.”
At the Surveillance Club meeting, Sonne shared his plans to listen in on police scanners during the summit and disseminate information to protesters via Twitter, according to fellow members of the group.
This was the same tactic used by two protesters at last year’s G20 summit in Pittsburgh, a plan that ultimately led to their arrests. The charges were dropped.
