St. Catharines man is behind bars accused of sexual assault at Canadian Tire store

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A St. Catharines man remains behind bars after he was accused of viciously assaulting a Canadian Tire employee in the washroom of the store where she was working yesterday evening.

Shortly after 8 pm Tuesday, a woman came down from putting her child to bed, and found 41-year-old Kevin Kohl in her dining room. She doesn’t want to be identified, but she’s known Kohl since January. She works at Canadian Tire, and she thinks he went there earlier in the night to find her. “He said he went to look for me. And I wasn’t there.” She could tell he was on drugs and asked him to leave. She didn’t know about the assault at the store, which is just down a short path from her house. Not until a friend knocked on her door. “Something had happened at my work, and wanted to make sure I wasn’t working. And then told me what happened, and then I realized that it was him.”

Kohl was still in her back yard. She called police. He took her bike and fled, but was arrested shortly afterwards.
“A 19 year old female had been lured into a washroom and then sexually assaulted within the washroom” said Phil Gavin from Niagara Regional Police. “After about half an hour the female was released”

Staff at the store were visibly shaken and upset. The manager choked back tears when he commented that he didn’t have a recent update on how the victim is doing.

Kohl’s friend says he called his dad from her house to pick him up, and his father showed up in time for the police manhunt. We spoke to his father at his home in Port Colborne. “The guy needs help. And we can’t get it.”
He said his son has a drug problem, but he also blamed a 2009 football accident. “And he was down in the end zone, caught a ball, went down and hit his head. They rushed him to London and he died…but they revived him. He was lucky to be alive but he’s had nothing but problems since then.”

His friend says Kohl always seemed kind and compassionate. His criminal record though, has more than a dozen charges dating back to 1996. They include robbery and sexual assault.