EXCLUSIVE: Peel police chief subject of $21M lawsuit alleging SIU interference
Posted December 9, 2016 3:26 pm.
Last Updated December 9, 2016 7:16 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Bombshell allegations are being levelled against the chief of one of Canada’s largest police forces. Peel Regional police Chief Jennifer Evans is named in a $21 million lawsuit filed on behalf of a woman who was struck by a stray police bullet in March of 2015.
Suzan Zreik, in the second year of a three year police course at Humber College, was standing in her kitchen when a police bullet came whizzing through the window and lodged in her back.
It was one of 19 bullets police fired that night. Eleven bullets hit and killed their target, Marc Ekamba-Boekwa, a man being questioned about a neighbourhood dispute earlier that day.
The eight remaining bullets went flying around Queen Frederica Drive in Mississauga. One police bullet also hit a fellow officer, who was wearing a bullet proof vest.
The lawsuit names the Peel Police force, the officers involved in the shooting, and the chief, who is accused of interfering in the SIU investigation of the controversial shooting.
Chief Evans is accused of making a middle of the night bedside visit to Zreik just hours after she was rushed to hospital.
Zreik’s lawyer, Michael Moon tells CityNews that Chief Evans handed his client her business card, with her handwritten cell phone number and allegedly told her “that if she needed anything to give her a call and that her future career in policing was all but guaranteed.”
CityNews called the phone number on the card. Chief Evans answered the phone, and said she was not aware of the lawsuit. When asked about specific allegations, Evans said she couldn’t speak because the matter was “before the courts.”
The lawsuit also accuses Chief Evans of deliberately “misleading” the SIU into believing Zreik’s injuries were not serious enough to warrant being interviewed by the SIU, which only intervenes in matters of death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault involving police.
Zreik’s lawyer also claims his client was taken to 12 division and “interrogated for two hours” and that the nature of the questions “were geared towards exculpating the police” and to “clear them of any wrongdoing.”
“She wasn’t even properly dressed,” Moon added. “They had her wear prisoner’s shoes…”
The SIU had previously cleared all officers of any wrongdoing in the shooting, saying that Zreik “was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Related:
SIU probing Mississauga incident with 2 cops wounded, man killed
Witness calls 2015 police shooting of Ekamba-Boekwa a ‘Wild West shootout’
Both the SIU and Peel Police told CityNews they could not comment on the lawsuit as the matter is before the courts, but the SIU said that if it “learned that a police officer had interfered with our investigation, we would investigate.”
The lawsuit’s statement of claims also alleges one of the officers who fired shots that night was a probationary officer and was the daughter of a recently retired Peel police superintendent who had close ties to Evans. According to the allegations, which haven’t been proven in court, she had failed her firearm’s qualifications and shouldn’t have been carrying a gun that night.
Former SIU director Ian Scott said the allegations are disturbing and should be taken seriously. “Generally chiefs do not get involved in any kind of material way,” he said. “The Police Services Board for Peel should take this very seriously and they should consider their power to refer this to the Ontario Civilian Police Commission for further investigation. A lot of this hinges on when the mandate of the SIU was invoked.”
Andre Marin, former Ontario ombudsman and a former SIU director, also weighed in on the allegations that Chief Evans interfered with the SIU probe.
“It could be completely harmless or completely inadvertent, but you are playing with a hot potato,” he said. “You never want to do anything that could directly or indirectly affect the integrity of an SIU criminal investigation.”
Mississauga mayor Bonnie Crombie, who remains on the Peel Regional Services Board until 2017, called the allegations “very troubling.”
When asked if she would push to have the case put before the Ontario Civilian Police Commission, Crombie said: “This would certainly now make it onto that agenda should we have the opportunity to meet before the New Year.”