CONSTABLE GUILTY
Assaults against women
An Ottawa police constable charged with the most crimes ever laid against an Ottawa officer pleaded guilty Thursday to just five of the 32 criminal charges he was originally charged with — four counts of assault against four women and one count of uttering threats.
The charges against Const. Eric Post, 49 — including six counts of breach of trust, six counts of harassment and three counts of forcible confinement — were laid in September 2018 after seven women came forward with allegations about his conduct.
The most serious of those charges, including two counts of sexual assault and pointing a firearm, were related to one woman, who died by suicide before the trial was scheduled to start.
Prosecutors abandoned those charges after her death.
Post has been suspended from the Ottawa force since June 2018. He was hired by the service in 2002. According to multiple sources, Post is expected to resign from the police service and will therefore not face an internal disciplinary hearing, though he still has to be sentenced by a criminal court for his crimes.
Ontario Court Justice Robert Wadden accepted Post's guilty plea to the five charges in a virtual hearing Thursday and cancelled his remaining trial dates.
Post was first charged after several women reported his conduct to police, including to the force's professional standards section, after meeting him through dating websites and apps. The complaints spanned five years, between 2013 and the time of his arrest. The four
women who came forward with allegations, to which Post ultimately pleaded guilty, were at one time romantically involved with the man.
Though the victims did not know each other, the stories they described to police contained remarkable similarities, prosecutors said, “in terms of how (Post) mistreated them.”
Two additional women were named as victims in court, though Crown prosecutors noted Post's guilty plea did not apply to their allegations.
All of the women's names are shielded by a publication ban that was requested by prosecutors.
One assault victim met Post online in 2013, a few months after he had separated from his wife, and would later describe to police the tensions in their relationship, his “controlling” demands and the times he yelled at her in public, including one incident that caused her “shame and humiliation.”
During an argument in 2014, Post stood in the doorway blocking her from leaving her house, insisting “they talk about things further instead.”
Post grabbed her by the wrists and threw keys at her as she left,” according to an agreed statement of facts read into the court record by Julie Scott, former prosecutor and now director of Crown operations for Ontario's east region.
Assistant Crown attorney Peter Napier prosecuted the case, while Post was represented by defence lawyers Michael Edelson and Tony Paciocco.
Even after she ended the relationship and told Post to stop contacting her, the officer showed up at her workplace “in full police uniform, and with flowers in hand, in an effort to win her back,” court heard. “This shocked and frightened (the victim).”
Another woman who dated Post in 2016 described his “erratic” behaviour “even early into their relationship.” He once met up with her at a downtown café, and publicly berated her — while in uniform — when the woman hugged another man in front of him.
During an argument that summer, sparked when the woman showed up at Post's house wearing an outfit that he said made her look “disgusting,” he grabbed her by the wrists and blocked the doorway for 30 minutes as she tried to leave.
She didn't complain to police until two years later, court heard, because Post “was always trying to put the fear of God in her, and, as a big guy who often yelled, could be very scary.”
On his first date with another woman in 2017, the woman told investigators, he unexpectedly grabbed her by the throat, gripped her tightly and told her he didn't know “whether he wanted to choke her or kiss her.”
He threatened on another date in 2018, as they were driving over a bridge, that if she ever cheated on him, “He would throw her body in the river, and that he would get away with it because he is a police officer.”
It was their second date.
That woman went to police after a friend became increasingly concerned with her descriptions of Post's behaviour.
Another woman, who was not in a relationship with him, complained of her sole interaction with Post, not on a date, but while he was on duty and responding to a call for service at a downtown shelter for a woman in mental health distress.
The employee who had called for police help said Post ushered the distressed woman out of her office, closed the door so they could speak privately, and began flirting with her.
He began to cite issues with transporting the woman, and as the conversation got “heated,” Post admitted, the woman may have felt “panicked … given his size.”
Post admitted he used the opportunity “to try to get to know (the woman) better personally, and that he offered her a drive home.”
He also obtained the woman's cellphone number from dispatchers, but Post claimed that was only “to see if (issues) could be resolved over the phone without his needing to return to the (shelter) again.”
Post is scheduled to be sentenced April 1.
If you are feeling distressed, the Distress Centre of Ottawa can be reached 24 hours a day at 613-2383311.