The province’s Special Investigations Unit has cleared an OPP officer who chased a wrong-way driver on Highway 407 in Brampton earlier this year, only to have the suspects first cause a serious collision and then make off with his cruiser.
On Jan. 8, 2016, the OPP officer was parked in the shoulder of the eastbound lanes of Highway 407 with his radar out, looking for speeders.
At about 7:30 p.m., the officer told SIU investigators he spotted a car approaching from the rear of his cruiser at high speed. The officer found the vehicle to be going 152 km/h.
The officer then saw the suspect vehicle had slowed down considerably, pulled a u-turn and was now heading the wrong way in the westbound lanes of the highway.
The suspect vehicle then headed the wrong way onto the Highway 410 on-ramp.
The SIU said the officer put his sirens on, pulled a three-point turn and headed to the on-ramp.
When the officer arrived at the ramp about 30 seconds later, he found that suspect vehicle had collided head-on with another car heading the right way on the ramp.
Two men got out of the suspect vehicle, hopped over a concrete barrier and ran down an embankment away from the scene. The OPP officer gave chase and noticed one of the men was holding a toddler in his arms.
The SIU says the man carrying the toddler then doubled back to the crash scene, left the toddler and climbed into the officer’s cruiser and locked its doors.
The officer tried to open his cruiser’s doors but the man hit the gas and drove away, dragging the officer along the ground for a short distance in the process.
After losing the cruiser, the officer then saw a seven-year-old child standing on the embankment near the crash. The officer collected the child and then found a 37-year-old woman in the car that was struck by the suspect vehicle suffering serious injuries.
Paramedics arrived at the scene a short while later and took the woman and two children to hospital for treatment.
The stolen OPP cruiser, which had a GPS locator, was found a short time later abandoned in Mississauga.
The SIU conducted interviews with four civilian eyewitnesses, collected notes from three witness police officers and interviewed the subject OPP officer.
The SIU also obtained mechanical reports of both civilian vehicles involved in the crash.
SIU Director Tony Loparco said the OPP officer “did absolutely nothing that could even remotely be considered to be a causal contribution to the woman’s injuries.”
“He was acting lawfully when he attempted to initiate a routine traffic stop, and the extraordinary events that followed were completely unforeseeable.”
The SIU investigates any interaction between an Ontario police officer and a member of the public that results in death, serious injury or an allegation of sexual assault.
