Director of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU) Joseph Martino has terminated an investigation into the serious injuries sustained by a 31-year-old man during a standoff in Orillia on Jan. 18.
OPP officers attended a home in Orillia where family members were concerned about a man’s safety after he indicated that he wanted to hurt himself. A perimeter was set up around the home, an Emergency Response Team and the Tactics and Rescue Unit were mobilized, and paramedics were staged nearby, according to police. In the following hours, officers contacted the man by phone urging him not to hurt himself, aiming to negotiate a peaceful resolution, apprehend the man and take him to a hospital for assessment. The man continued to refuse the officers’ appeals, police say.
Officers deployed tear gas and entered the home after the man was observed through a second-floor window with a knife at his throat at around 9 p.m. The man was located in a bathroom having cut himself multiple times, according to the OPP.
He was taken into custody after a short altercation in which he threw a knife at an officer, cutting the officer’s hand, and was bit on the legs by a police dog. After being apprehended, the man was taken by an ambulance to a hospital in Orillia before being transferred to a trauma centre in Toronto.
Director Martino said that, based on the SIU’s preliminary inquiries, he is satisfied that there is nothing to investigate as far as the potential criminal liability of any police officer in connection to the incident.
“There were clear grounds for the man’s apprehension under section 17 of the Mental Health Act considering his suicidal ideations. And there is no suggestion in the evidence of any excessive force or want of care in the officers’ dealings with the man,” Martino said. “On the contrary, the evidence indicates that the police approached the situation with an appropriate degree of vigilance, working patiently over hours to secure a safe outcome for all concerned but forcing the issue when it appeared the man’s health and safety were in imminent danger.”
Martino continued on to say that he was unable to find fault with the use of the police dog due to the fact that the man was armed with a knife, which he threw at a police officer. The officers had good cause to engage him at a distance with the release of the dog, he said, so the investigation is discontinued and the file is closed.