Actual snowstorm gaffes: Criminals’ footprints make it easy for police
At 5:45 a.m. on Jan. 12 this year, a Sunday, Gaetan Fortier was awakened by a phone call. The alarm at his store, the Heritage Clock Shop on King Street West in Brockville, had gone off.
Fortier hurried in to work to find the shop’s front window smashed, after a lone male with a rock in hand and larceny in mind decided to do a little pre-dawn shopping. In his rush to get in and out before police arrived, the man, says Fortier, didn’t get much: “Just a couple of inexpensive pocket watches and a couple of Caravelle watches.”
But by the time Fortier arrived, the case had pretty much been solved, after police followed the burglar’s footprints in the snow, which led them to an apartment a few blocks away, where a 27-yearold suspect was found with the watches.
Similarly, OPP in Pembroke got an assist from Old Man Winter in November 2016, when fresh snow helped them track a man who broke into a daycare and, after threatening the custodian who discovered him, fled.
According to Ottawa police, this sort of crime-solving happens quite frequently. “As soon as it snows,” said one officer, “the resolution rate for break-and-enters goes up, because these guys are not that smart. “The snow really helps.”
It goes beyond break-and-enters. Fresh snowfalls don’t help suspects trying to elude capture by jumping fences and running through backyards and fields, or cars leaving crime scenes, especially at night in rural areas, where their tire tracks might be the only ones on the road.
But snowfalls also don’t help many drivers. Witness the 350 motor-vehicle collisions in Ottawa over three days in January 2019, after a 30-centimetre dump was followed by bitterly cold temperatures.
So for those looking for some activity to do in all this freshly fallen snow, what with the Rideau Canal Skateway now closed for the season and Mayor Jim Watson urging folks to “work from home” (a euphemism, perhaps, for “don’t count on LRT?”), we strongly recommend against criminal actions or any unnecessary driving.
But who knows what snowy exercise might get you in trouble. Recall the 28-year-old Hydro One power-line technician who, in February 2016, was spending his first winter in Ottawa. He’d always wanted to go on a snowshoe hike downtown, and decided to use the 51.2 cm of snow that fell then as an excuse to call in sick and undertake what he called “a totally awesome experience!” He even sent a photo of himself with snowshoes and ski poles, in front of the Parliament Buildings, to this paper, asking us to publish it. He wasn’t worried about getting caught by his employers, he said; the experience “was totally worth it.”
He was soon after fired for his non-medical truancy.
What else did Ottawans do during past storms? When 56 cm of snow, which fell on Feb. 26-27, 1887, cancelled a planned exhibition of the power of the multi-barrel Nordenfelt gun at the Rideau Rifle Range at Strathcona Park (to which prime minister Sir John A. Macdonald and other political figures were invited), officials decided to conduct an experiment examining the bullet-stopping qualities of snow. Maj. Anderson, of the 43rd Battalion, felt that a snowbank of sufficient thickness would be able to halt any bullet, providing a useful technique for constructing shelter trenches during winter campaigns.
A mound of closely packed snow, 10 feet thick at the base, was built, and bullets fired at it from 200 and 500 feet. The Ottawa Citizen’s headline the following Monday neatly summed up the undertaking’s success: “SNOW WON’T STOP BULLETS.”
There were, thankfully, no casualties.
And on March 2-3, 1947, a record 73 cm of snow fell on Ottawa, prompting the Citizen to call it “the storm to end all storms.” Snow removal, of course, was slowed due to the horses being exhausted, but the Ottawa Electric Railway, precursor to today’s OC Transpo, continued service on all its routes save the Britannia one, where cars were briefly interrupted on the morning of the second day. But according to a spokesperson from the Civic Bureau, “Ottawans took the big storm as a matter of course.”
And when firefighters arrived at Sussex Drive and Rideau Street, where an overheated car had caught fire, passersby had already put it out using mittenfuls of snow.
So, to recap: When snowy days offer up some free time, rocks, guns, cars and crime are bad. Snowballs, on the other hand, are good. Now get out there and play. bdeachman@postmedia.com