No charges against cop whose gun was used to shoot girl

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This article was published 22/08/2016 (2821 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

No criminal charges will be laid against an RCMP officer whose service weapon was used to shoot a teen girl last fall.

The Winnipeg Police Service was asked to investigate whether charges such as improper storage of a firearm should be laid. It worked with the Crown prosecutors office and the province’s Independent Investigation Unit and determined none should be laid, WPS spokesman Robert Carver said Tuesday.

“There wasn’t enough to support charges,” he said.

Such an investigation, involving a police officer from another police force, is “fairly rare” for detectives to deal with, Carver said. He couldn’t speak specifically about the work involved in this investigation, but said police would generally have interviewed witnesses as well as potential victims and anyone with knowledge of how the handgun was stored and how it should have been stored according to RCMP policy.

Carver said the WPS handled this investigation “with the utmost care” as it would any other, regardless of the fact another police officer was involved.

“We tread very carefully whenever we’re doing an investigation. Really, people’s lives and futures are at stake. And we don’t do that any different when there’s a police officer involved than we would any other person,” he said.

“I don’t think the public has any tolerance, and our service doesn’t, for anything other than an absolute, 100 per cent effort and a completely unbiased investigation, and we try and do that, I think, whatever we’re doing.”

Court documents that gave the account of the Mountie at the centre of the controversy said the gun was stolen after thieves broke into the officer’s house in the middle of the night, stole the keys to his RCMP vehicle and then used the keys to reach weapons inside a locked box in the vehicle.

In the court documents related to a civil suit against RCMP Sgt. Chris McCuen, the RCMP said it was waiting on the WPS investigation to wrap up before it could complete its own internal investigation into what happened the night McCuen’s gun was stolen.

Calli Vanderaa’s family sued the police, alleging in their statement of claim the sergeant violated RCMP firearms policy and left his police belt “replete with firearm, taser and baton, visible on the back seat of the car.”

Calli, 16, had been in a car with five of her friends when a man she’d never met walked up and fired the gun through the back window. The bullet went into her chest, puncturing her lung and damaging her colon and spleen.

Matthew Wilfred McKay, 22, was charged with two counts of attempted murder, theft under $5,000, mischief under $5,000 and weapons charges. Matthew Andrew Miles, 25, was charged with two counts of theft under $5,000 and weapons charges.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca