‘I can’t go any quicker,’ SIU director says
The Special Investigations Unit is still not able to say what caused the Nov. 26 shooting death of Jameson Shapiro, an 18-month-old autistic boy who had been abducted by his father from a home in Trent Lakes, just northeast of Bobcaygeon.
Shapiro was found dead of gunshot wounds in the back of a pickup truck after three OPP officers shot his father during an interaction after a collision at a roadblock OPP were setting up on Pigeon Lake Road east of Lindsay. The 33-year-old father died in hospital almost a week later.
An OPP officer who had been outside a cruiser laying down a spike belt to halt the pickup truck was also seriously injured in a collision, which also involved a civilian’s pickup truck.
Two police-issued rifles and one police-issued pistol were recovered from the scene by investigators and one pistol was found in the father’s pickup.
None of the three subject officers have agreed to be interviewed by SIU investigators, as is their charter right. Eighteen witness officers and 14 civilian witnesses have been interviewed.
Ballistics testing has yet to determine how the child was shot, the SIU reported in an update on the investigation earlier this month.
“We are trying as fast as we can to see if we can identify who is responsible,” SIU director Joseph Martino told the Toronto Star’s Rosie DiManno on Tuesday. “But this case is going to come down to a puzzle. It’s not going to be one piece of evidence that’s going to give us that answer.”
The agency is still awaiting reports from completed forensic examinations. One of those is a trajectory analysis, which would give investigators “a sense of angles,” Martino said.
“Another piece of the puzzle is we have some blood-stain patterns. It’s important to know who’s blood is whose. We don’t have that report yet either. Hopefully that will also give us a sense of positioning within the vehicle,” Martino told DiManno.
An autopsy on the child was conducted Nov. 28 and there was an autopsy Dec. 4 on the father. The SIU still awaits the autopsy reports.
“When we get all this it’ll paint a picture where we will know with some degree of confidence who’s responsible,” Martino told DiManno.
“Until you’ve got the full picture, we’d be really out on a limb, going out there with a finding.
“I can’t go any quicker.”
There is no body camera footage from the interaction, he said.
Martino acknowledges that if a similar event had occurred in the U.S., law enforcement would have made such information public much sooner.
“No doubt about it,” Martino told DiManno. “It’s a different landscape down there. When you look at the news and see all this body camera footage, it seems like within hours.”
The SIU is an independent government agency that investigates the conduct of police officers that may have resulted in death, serious injury, sexual assault and/or the discharge of a firearm at a person.