Former Crown prosecutor Glenn Kelt, pictured with his daughter, Caitlyn, is remembered as someone who understood the complexity of being human and who knew life doesn’t come in black and white.Supplied/Supplied
There’s a section of concrete where no moss will grow in Glenn Kelt’s yard in Nanaimo, B.C.
It’s been that way for 20-odd years, ever since the infamous deep-fried turkey incident. Mr. Kelt was a well-known master of meats and had been successful at cooking a bird in a boiling vat of oil several times before. That day though, the turkey didn’t take well to its grease bath and soon forced the oil up and out of the pot in an explosive flourish.
It’s one of the only times anyone close to Mr. Kelt can remember him making a mistake. By all accounts, the criminal prosecutor, husband and father of two moved through life with a cheerful ease. He died of respiratory failure on May 5 in Nanaimo at the age of 70.
Glenn Stuart Kelt was born in Burnaby, B.C., on Oct. 3, 1952, and grew up there with his parents, Stuart and Esther Kelt, and sisters, Heather and Barbara. He spent his childhood and teenage years playing box lacrosse, wandering down to the Fraser River near his home to play on log booms with his friends and going on rain-soaked camping trips with the Scouts.
After completing an undergraduate degree in political science in 1975 at the University of British Columbia, he enrolled in law school there and found his calling. He supported himself through summer jobs at the City of Vancouver, as a pretrial officer at the old Oakalla regional correctional centre in Burnaby, and at an asbestos mine in northern B.C. Mr. Kelt finished his law degree in 1978 and headed to Prince George the following year for his first position as a Crown prosecutor.
He hopped from Prince George to Cranbrook before settling in Nanaimo in 1989, where he was later named deputy regional Crown counsel. In 2001, he was named to Queen’s Counsel.
Mr. Kelt worked on numerous murder trials, including that of Allan Schoenborn who killed his three young children in their beds. The prosecutor grappled daily with the aftermath of such acts, but his former colleagues say that experience never seemed to colour his perception of the world too harshly. He understood the complexity of being human and knew life doesn’t come in black and white.
Mr. Kelt would at times take calls from murderers he had put in prison who needed someone to talk to, recalled his son, Tagg Kelt, and he would also go out of his way to pick up hitchhikers.
“He was a presence. You could feel real safe around him – like he could stop anything if he wanted to or make anything happen.”
Indeed, Mr. Kelt seemed to draw people to him. Colleagues remember him easily putting jurors and witnesses at ease with his words, and say they couldn’t resist swinging by his office at the end of a workday for a good laugh. His daughter, Caitlyn Kelt, says even her friends weren’t immune; they often opted to hang out after school at her house, which was always welcoming.
“If you walked through his doorway, you were his friend,” Caitlyn says.
Mr. Kelt always hosted his office Christmas and retirement parties, but he didn’t need such occasions as an excuse to whip out his array of barbecues and have people over. “The Fleet,” as he lovingly called it, was a collection of about five or six meat-grilling machines, from propane and natural gas barbecues, to charcoal ones, to a most-revered Big Green Egg.
“Oh boy, you’d go to his place, and if he cooked meat, look out, it was going to be magnificent,” Derrill Prevett, a fellow former Nanaimo prosecutor, recalls.
In addition to his hospitality, Mr. Kelt was also well loved for his sense of humour and quick wit.
“He had a real joie de vivre about him, and he inspired that in others,” Supreme Court Justice Jennifer Power says.
Still, Mr. Kelt wasn’t without his moments of stress or frustration when work wasn’t going the way he had hoped, Mr. Prevett says.
“A trial is a very emotional event, and it affects everyone.”
Mr. Kelt’s children remember how he would suddenly space out for a few minutes while sitting at the dinner table or in front of the TV, lost in thought about one of his cases.
“They were always on his mind,” Tagg says.
His profession often meant long days and work trips away from home, but there were upsides for his kids as well. The only way to get him away from the office was to disconnect him entirely, Caitlyn says, so the family took three- to four-week-long camping trips every summer while she and her brother were growing up.
They fondly remember a particularly exciting year when they accidentally ended up in Disneyland after driving down the west coast in an attempt to outrun the rain.
Caitlyn says her father loved to engage her in debate and always kept an open mind. Tagg recalls being able to get away with things because his shenanigans “paled in comparison” to the trouble his father was used to dealing with.
“It was like I was being graded on a curve for bad behaviour,” Tagg jokes.
Mr. Kelt retired in 2011 and spent more time on some of the simple things he had always loved: keeping up-to-date with the Toronto Blue Jays (and nagging Tagg to do the same), reading (especially history books), watching movies from his 400-plus collection of DVDs and VHS tapes, and helping out in the community.
“He’s one of the finest lawyers I ever met,” says Oleh Kuzma, whom Mr. Kelt mentored in the early 1980s. “Glenn had, to me, this innate ability to look at and analyze the most complex, the most voluminous files or issues, and distill them and reduce them to their essence, their very core.”
Mr. Kelt leaves his wife, Catherine Kelt; their children, Caitlyn and Tagg Kelt; and their grandchildren, Cash, Presley, Ellie and Harvey.