Watchdog clears Ottawa police officers after suspect's fall at parking garage

Ontario’s civilian police oversight agency has ruled there is no basis for criminal charges against two Ottawa Police Service officers after a man who was a suspect in a break-in at a ByWard Market bar was seriously injured in a fall from the third level of a parking garage.

The Oct. 19 report by Special Investigations Unit director Joseph Martino said there was “no evidence to reasonably conclude that either subject official transgressed the limits of care prescribed by the criminal law” in the incident that occurred on May 23.

In the early hours of that day, police were seeking the 32-year-old man for reportedly breaking into a bar near York Street and Sussex Drive, the SIU report said. Officers spotted the man in a nearby parking garage, he ran and officers chased him for a matter of seconds before he climbed over a third-floor railing and fell to the sidewalk, it said, adding he was taken to hospital with a brain bleed and skull fracture.

Martino, the report said, found that the officers “could not have anticipated the man would imperil his life by climbing over the railing” and that they did what they could do to help the man, who hung from the railing with his hands before falling.

The man was interviewed in mid-June, slightly less than a month after the fall, as part of the SIU investigation.

The SIU is an independent government agency that investigates the conduct of officials, including municipal police officers, that may have resulted in death, serious injury, sexual assault and/or the discharge of a firearm at a person.

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