SIU terminates investigation into officer firing gun in Mississauga

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Published May 29, 2020 at 2:16 pm

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Joseph Martino, the director of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), has terminated an investigation into a police-involved shooting in Mississauga that occurred in August 2019.

According to the SIU, the investigation has been terminated because the man involved in the incident was not injured by the officer who fired at him, but rather in a dispute he was allegedly involved in prior to his altercation with police.

The SIU says that on August 13, 2019, a Peel Regional Police officer was dispatched to an address on Apple Circle Crescent following reports that a 29-year-old man had shot a woman. 

According to the report, the officer located the man and chased him through neighbouring streets and a nearby park, eventually cornering him on a lawn outside a home on Sandford Farm Drive. The report says the officer was unable to control the man, and the suspect ran to the officer’s cruiser–which was still running–and entered it. 

The report says the officer discharged his conducted energy weapon at the man but the probes missed their mark. As the man was accelerating away in the cruiser, the officer fired his handgun five times in the cruiser’s direction. 

The cruiser was subsequently located, abandoned, on Idlewilde Crescent. As blood was found within the cruiser, the SIU launched an investigation on the basis that the man had been seriously injured in the incident.

Further investigation suggested the blood was not related to the shooting. 

“Based on the evidence, it is clear that the man was not struck by any of the bullets fired by the officer,” Martino wrote.

“The blood in the cruiser was the result of a cut to the man’s arm inflicted in the domestic incident that had prompted the call to police that same day. Accordingly, as the SIU’s jurisdiction is not engaged, the investigation is hereby discontinued, and the file is closed.”

The man was arrested on Nov. 14, 2019.

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