Officer laughed about call

RCMP CPL. WAS ‘SKEPTICAL’ ABOUT SHOTSFIRED CALL

An RCMP officer laughed with a police dispatcher about a call reporting six gunshot sounds in a quiet neighbourhood in rural British Columbia in 2008, not realizing that a woman lay dying inside her home, a coroner’s inquest has heard.

Cpl. Michael White, then a constable with seven years of experience, and another officer responded to the call and drove around the neighbourhood in Mission. But the inquest heard they did not get out of their vehicles to investigate or contact the neighbour who made the call.

Lisa Dudley, 37, and her boyfriend Guthrie McKay had been shot in an attack over a marijuana grow-op in their home. McKay died immediately but Dudley was paralyzed and lay in the home for four days until a neighbour checked in and called for help.

She died in the ambulance on the way to hospital.

A coroner’s inquest heard a recording Monday of the conversation White had with the police dispatcher.

“Six gunshots in a row and a crash,” he said before laughing.

“Yeah, exactly. Don’t you love this?” the dispatcher replied.

Monique Pongracic Speier, a lawyer for Dudley’s family, asked White whether he thought a shots-fired call was funny.

“No, it’s not funny,” he told the inquest. “I was skeptical.”

White told the fivemember jury he had reservations about the call because it was an unusually high number of gunshots and it had only been reported by one neighbour. It could have been firecrackers or another unknown noise, he said.

Because the dispatcher told him the caller had heard a “crash,” White assumed there had been a car accident, which could have been caused by shots being fired at a vehicle, he testified.