Three deaths. One police officer. And a chilling confession.
How a Brantford constable’s rambling murder confession sparked an investigation that revealed the ruinous toll of lethal force — on both sides of the gun
BRANTFORD, ONT.— Light snow had fallen from the pre-dawn blackness the morning an off-duty officer pulled up to his police station for an unannounced visit. He stepped out of his black Ford Explorer and passed through the doors of the squat brick Brantford police headquarters, heading toward the constable on duty. It was 4:45 a.m., two weeks before Christmas in 2014.
Nearly10 years had passed since Const. Adam Hill fulfilled his desire to become a “protector.” Armed with a Glock .40 and badge No. 28575 he started walking the beat straight out of training at the Ontario Police College. He’d been hired in Brantford, a city with the laid-back essence of a small town, founded on southwestern Ontario’s meandering Grand River. He’d pounded out shifts that stretched into the night, investigated disturbance calls and patrolled the streets. Four years in he’d changed gears, beginning a stint in two high schools, telling the local paper he hoped to “build bridges between police and students” as he strolled the halls.
A tough guy vibe emanates from the tall, darkhaired Hill, his arms cloaked in sleeves of dark tattoos, one saying “Where Loyalty Lies.” But on this morning, he appeared dishevelled. Bible passages spilled from his lips. He said that he was fearful of God’s judgment.
Hill needed to talk about the deaths. He wanted to dissect his conduct — where he’d been, what he’d done, how he’d lied about what happened. The on-duty constable took him deeper into the station, where he continued his frenzied speech, first with a sergeant and then with an inspector. The officers would later describe their colleague as obsessive, paranoid and delusional.
Not long after, an inspector and constable drove Hill to a nearby health-care facility, where he was admitted. Over the next 72 hours, Hill continued spouting contradictory statements to more Brantford officers visiting him in hospital, making incriminating utterances to seven cops in all.
I lied, he said — I was told to. There’d been a knife. There wasn’t a knife. Was there a knife? Hill’s words were disjointed, but the officer repeatedly referred to himself in stark terms. He kept saying he was a “murderer.”
Evan Jones stumbled up the steps to his house. Wearing nothing but a T-shirt and grey boxer briefs, he lingered for a moment, muttering something indiscernible to Misty, the family cat, then walked in the front door. It was just after 8 p.m. on an August night in 2010, and he was drunk.
The corner lot townhouse on Sympatica Cres., a housing co-op in Brantford’s north end, was the only home the 18-year-old had known. Lean verging on skinny, with an easy grin and black hair buzzed close to his head, Jones, who had Miawpukek First Nation heritage, grew up in the house with his mother, Caroline Leblanc, and three older siblings, Jessica, William and Emily. In its kitchen he conducted midnight experiments with cookie and brownie recipes, leaving a morning mess for everyone else to clean up.
A nature lover since he was a boy, Jones had been drawn to the banks of the nearby Grand, bringing home a menagerie of creatures he insisted needed rescuing — mice, turtles, rabbits and, his favourite, snakes. Lately he’d been building a pond in the backyard, carving a trough in the dirt, reinforcing it with tarp, hoping to someday populate it with fish. He had begun talking about getting his own place and entering the trades, ideally underwater welding.
But for all his plans, the summer of 2010 had been a bad one. Jones had been drinking and taking drugs. He’d dropped out of high school and been arrested after brawling with his brother, resulting in Evan being charged with assaulting a police officer. In June, Leblanc took him to Brantford General Hospital after he downed a handful of Aspirin. He was diagnosed as suffering from substance abuse and depression, and later voiced suicidal thoughts. Throughout June and July, he was in and out of psychiatric care, one time escaping from hospital after he had been admitted under Ontario’s Mental Health Act, which allows people to be detained when they are a risk to others or themselves. He was prescribed antidepressants and antipsychotics, drugs that made him miserable and irritable. “He wasn’t himself,” Leblanc said.
Leblanc was getting ready to leave for work when Jones came home. A delicately thin woman with brown hair parted down the middle, she was a personal support worker on the overnight shift at a nursing home. She was often exhausted, caring for both Jones and her aging mother. She was worried about her son, but angry with him, too. Earlier that day she’d called the Brantford youth addictions facility, desperate for advice on his medication and mood swings. For months she had been trying to get her son into a treatment program. That night was her last shift before she was to take a week off to get a handle on his care.
Slurring his words and crying about a fight he’d just had with a friend, Jones uttered a strange explanation about his missing shorts, saying he’d lost them in the river. He was oscillating between anger and despair and making little sense. When he sat down to use a computer that malfunctioned, it set him off, and he began swearing, tossing things around and banging against the walls. Leblanc knew she couldn’t deal with it alone that night. She walked out her front door onto the lawn and dialed 911.
“Yes, uh, my son is in the house, and he’s drunk and I need him removed,” she said, her tone annoyed. “He’s just throwing things around and going crazy.”
“So he’s just throwing things around?” the dispatcher asked, after taking down Leblanc’s information.
“Yeah, but,” Leblanc countered. “I dunno, I’m outside.”
The exchange was casual, lasting less than two minutes. When the dispatcher asked if Jones was alone in the house, Leblanc said her youngest daughter, Emily, was upstairs with her granddaughter, Alexis. “Are the people in the house safe?” the dispatcher asked, after a long pause. “Well, she’s got a lock on her door, so,” Leblanc replied, nonchalant.
“I’m gonna need you to attend,” the dispatcher radioed to officers nearby over the police communication system. He told them a mother had “run outside” to escape her intoxicated son, who was inside the home with two other people who “have barricaded themselves in their rooms.” In clipped bursts of radio calls, cops on the road and dispatchers pinged messages back and forth. “I’m just about to roll up.” “10-4.” Leblanc stood on the lawn near its lone tree as sirens pierced the nighttime calm. Two Brantford police cars pulled up in quick succession. A pair of officers, a man and a woman, stepped out of the first. Hill, who was nearing the end of his shift, climbed out of the second.
Jones walked outside to meet the officers in nothing but his underwear. He stood still and claimed the front stoop, holding a knife in each hand. As Leblanc watched, he brought each one to his throat and began slicing shallow lines into his neck. Jones called out to the officers: “Kill me.”
Hill unholstered his Glock .40. Taking cover behind a car parked in the driveway, he quickly scanned the yard. Glancing sideways, he saw a fellow officer from the first car, Const. Kari Drake, on the grass nearby, her gun trained on Jones. The night was black, but Jones was lit up by the porch light. Hill could see he was sweating, the teen’s eyes staring intently at him.
“Drop the knife, Evan. Do it now,” Hill shouted. “Drop the knife!”
Leblanc froze. She watched as another constable, Leonard Van Holst, arrived in a third vehicle. The officers kept demanding Jones drop the knives; Hill was the most aggressive, Leblanc thought, yelling at Jones. She wanted to get closer to her son to reassure him and convince him to put the knives down. But police instructed her to move away. Leblanc was terrified.
Jones turned and went inside the house, shutting the front door behind him. Drake and a male auxiliary officer circled around to the back, while Hill and Van Holst took the front. The officers bounced more radio calls off each other — was anyone else inside? Drake radioed in: “A daughter and a granddaughter.” They decided they had to go in.
“Door is locked,” Hill said over his radio. “Permission to kick it?”
“Go for it,” Drake responded. “He’s at the back door yelling at me, Hilly.”
With a single kick, Hill forced the door open. He stepped into the narrow entryway, gun drawn, Van Holst behind him.
Upstairs, the phone rang. Emily answered. The dispatcher’s worried tone was insistent: “What’s going on inside there?” Emily had been putting her toddler to bed and knew little about the confrontation between her brother and police. Annoyed, she told the dispatcher she didn’t know where her brother was. “I think he’s standing at the door, or something,” she said. Then she heard a commotion downstairs. “Oh my God. I think there’s people in the house.”
She heard movement downstairs, people shouting. Then five shots. One, then two bursts of two, gunfire in a syncopated rhythm.
“What’s that banging?” asked the dispatcher.
The answer soon rang out over the radio. “Shots fired, subject down,” said a male officer, breathing heavily. The news travelled clinically, in rapid bursts and police lingo. “Male shot.” “Multiple gunshot wounds.”
Upstairs, Drake rapped on Emily’s door. The officer instructed her to grab her things but told her little else, Emily said. Flustered, Emily picked up her daughter and fled downstairs, an officer blocking her view into the living room. Starting to panic, she fixated on getting her flip-flops on with no hands, Alexis in her arms, the shoe refusing to turn right side up. When she walked outside, she saw bright yellow crime scene tape already strung up around the house. An officer escorted her to a waiting police car. Leblanc was waiting nearby, and they got in the cruiser together. With the click of the car door closing behind her, Emily turned to her mom. “They shot Evan,” Emily said.
Inside, in the living room, Jones was on the cement-grey carpet face up, skinny legs splayed and feet turned outward, arms at his side. Amidst the stuff of home — a wellworn couch, a high chair for Jones’ toddler niece, an upturned blue laundry hamper, a tub overflowing with baby toys — he lay in a pool of blood. His eyes were open.
The bullet from a police officer’s gun has a clear mission. Despite the common misconception that an officer’s firearm could be used to merely incapacitate — to shoot someone in the leg, say — training at the Ontario Police College and other academies across North America tells officers this is dangerous and should never be the goal.
Instead, officers are trained to aim for the torso, the largest part of the body. The rationale is to target the area most likely to immediately stop the threat: that is, the violent behaviour that the officer must have concluded posed an immediate risk of death or serious injury to anyone around. The tactic is also intended to reduce the likelihood of rogue bullets striking bystanders. By aiming for the chest area and its vital organs, officers know their actions come with heavy consequences. Once they make the decision to pull the trigger, they are likely to cause someone’s death.
While no Canadian agency reliably tracks police-involved deaths and whom they impact, coroner’s inquests in Ontario tell all-too-familiar stories about where a police bullet ends up. It often finds people who are mentally ill, under the influence of alcohol or drugs, or in the midst of a personal crisis. In Toronto, the bullet far too often homes in on dark skin, particularly Black men, at a disproportionate rate. It usually appears as the counterpoint to a knife or a hammer, sometimes a pellet gun, and will almost always prove more powerful.
In Ontario, when a coroner or pathologist extracts a police bullet from a body, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), the watchdog agency, will probe it for months or more. Ninetyfive per cent of the time in fatal shootings, the SIU determines police acted lawfully. In some cases, the bullet then takes on a second life, propelling protesters to the streets.
But the trajectory of this bullet moves in the opposite direction as well — there is almost always backfire. Along with their gun, police are handed a heavy responsibility to determine, sometimes in the span of seconds, whether to use it. There are consequences for everyone when they do. Just as those who are mentally ill are more likely to be killed by police, the officers who pull the trigger are often struck themselves, becoming more vulnerable to mental health conditions, including posttraumatic stress disorder, in the aftermath of a shooting. These wounds, too, must be treated and healed, for everyone’s well-being.
Six days after Jones’ death, Hill was back at the Brantford police station. He hadn’t worked since the shooting. With him in the boardroom were his lawyer, two members of the police union and two investigators from the SIU.
When a citizen dies during an encounter with Ontario police, the SIU investigators descend to conduct a probe. As in a homicide case, investigators gather forensic evidence and collect witness statements, trying to piece together the final moments before someone’s death.
The special powers granted to police add an extra layer of complexity to the probe. Officers can legally kill someone if they reasonably believe it is necessary to stop imminent serious injury or death to themselves or others. “Imminent” is the operative word. The threat cannot be potential, such as the mere possession of a weapon. The subject must appear to be ready to use it. If circumstances allow, the officer must employ other tools, whether pepper spray or a Taser or basic communication: “I don’t want to hurt you,” for example, or “What’s bothering you?” Officers are trained to use time and distance, their most valuable tools, to call in reinforcements, establish a rapport, anything to convince an agitated person to drop a weapon.
Lethal force must be used only as a last resort — though that does not mean officers must exhaust all other options. In some situations there simply may not be time for anything other than gunfire.
Within minutes of using deadly force, an officer transforms into a suspect. Adrenalin pumping, he must be sequestered from other officers to prevent collusion on the circumstances that led to the death. He has a right to silence — when the SIU comes knocking, he doesn’t have to say a word, doesn’t have to hand over his notes. But in silence there’s a gamble: an officer may fear that an investigator can’t determine whether lethal force was justified if he doesn’t describe his observations, doesn’t voice his fear.
“Take me back to that evening,” the SIU’s Roy Book instructed Hill.
Calmly, his words deliberate, Hill walked investigators through Jones’ last moments, reading at times from his notes. He spoke formally, using the police parlance of a “subject,” a “male.” “It all happened so fast,” Hill said. After he’d kicked down the door, Hill had moved into the hall, Van Holst behind him. Jones was about 15 feet down the tight hallway, knives still in his grasp, Hill said. The officer ventured in, fearful, his gun drawn but finger off the trigger. His steps inside the house had been propelled by concern for Emily and Alexis, he said; if Jones had been alone in the home, they would have avoided a confrontation. But the presence of others left him and his fellow officers no other option, he said.
Once he was inside, the hallway from the front entrance to the living room was “like a fatal funnel” — there was no cover, Hill told investigators. Jones began walking towards him and Van Holst, Hill said, the teen proclaiming: “I want to die.” As Jones advanced, Hill warned him to “get back,” and said he then used the pepper spray on his belt, but it only caused Jones to stumble back a few steps, Hill said. The teen then “charged” forward, Hill said, his eyes fixated, and knives in the air. Hill began firing, and almost simultaneously Jones spun around, prompting Hill to believe Drake, too, was in danger.
“That’s all I’m seeing, is those knives,” Hill said.
The officer told investigators that as he was shooting, he had to duck to avoid a knife Jones had thrown, which he believed landed at his feet.
“I thought I was going to die,” Hill said, voice breaking.
Jones had hit the ground on his back. Hill rushed over, first kicking the meat cleaver out of the teen’s reach then checking his vital signs. Counterintuitively, immediately after firing their weapons, officers must attempt life saving-measures, such as CPR. But Jones was pale and lifeless, his pulse fading. Hill watched him take his last gasp.
The officer left the house, now considered akin to a crime scene. A fellow cop took him back to the police station, where a sergeant seized his duty belt and Hill was placed on administrative leave. As the hours and days passed, he grew angry at Jones for creating a situation where Hill felt he had no choice but to shoot. But he was steadfast that the teen wanted to die by any means — that Jones would have killed him or another officer without intervention.
“I absolutely did not want to shoot that guy,” Hill said. “I had to.”
Van Holst and Drake backed up Hill’s account, though Drake did not see the shooting itself. Both later told a coroner’s inquest into Jones’ death that they tried everything to make Jones drop the knives. Nothing could have been done differently, Van Holst said.
In January 2011, four months after Jones was buried next to his grandfather in Brantford’s Mount Hope cemetery, the SIU released its decision. Hill had fired to “prevent an imminent, potentially lethal, attack,” the watchdog concluded. The officer was justified in shooting Jones.
Hill declined to be interviewed for this story, but allowed Mark Baxter, president of Brantford’s police association, to provide a written statement on his behalf. Hill, he said, “was put into a situation no police officer would ever want to be in.”
“Adam is human, he has a heart, and having to shoot an 18-year-old boy left him heartbroken.”
Glenn Stuart gave instructions to his son as if directing a movie — stand here, move this way, now lift your arms. Shortly after the SIU decision in 2011, the pair were at work inside Stuart’s Toronto law office, on a calm stretch of Queen St. E. Stuart’s son was working in his father’s office at the time, and his lean frame was similar to Jones’ five-foot-seven, 135pound body. Together, they acted out the possible trajectories of the four bullets that struck Jones. They wanted to reconstruct each one’s path.
A few days after her brother was killed, Jones’ oldest sister, Jessie, contacted Stuart, a soft-spoken litigator. She’d seen in the news that he was representing the family of a mentally ill man killed by Toronto police within days of her brother’s death. Stuart had met with Jones’ family in the living room where he was killed, the large blood stain still marking the carpet.
From the early days of the case, Stuart couldn’t understand how a mother’s call for help had ended in Jones being shot — his death “has always seemed on its facts to have been so avoidable,” he said. The lawyer began questioning the police story after seeing the post-mortem results: Jones had been shot in the back. One bullet grazed his shoulder, another travelled the width of his left arm and re-entered his side, and two more entered his back, one striking his heart before exiting through his chest. Hill said he began firing as Jones charged forward toward him with knives in hand, an account also given by Van Holst. But to Stuart, a different reading of the wounds was that Jones had been turning away.
The bullet through Jones’ left arm, his dominant hand, was particularly puzzling to Stuart. The angle of the wound, and the bullet’s re-entry into Jones’ torso, suggested to him that Jones’ arm may not have been raised, counter to Hill’s account that Jones charged with knives up.
He also had questions about the pepper spray: while the paramedic’s report notes a “very strong presence of pepper spray in the air,” Emily and her daughter hadn’t felt any effects when they came down the stairs. According to the Brantford Expositor, an SIU forensic investigator who had been present at the Jones autopsy didn’t remember any evidence that pepper spray had been used, but said it could have been vented through the open doors of Jones’ home after the shooting. Van Holst maintained that Hill deployed pepper spray.
Stuart had concerns, too, about the officers’ conduct. Whenever possible, officers are taught to avoid re- peatedly shouting commands because it can ratchet up tension. Instead, they should switch tactics if issuing the so-called police challenge — “drop the knife” — isn’t working. Ideally, they should attempt to offer help or ask questions, a proven deescalation tactic. Hill told the SIU he’d done so, but the station’s dispatch recordings — captured only when officers use their radios to loop each other in on developments in real time — picked up no such offers of help. Neither did audio recordings capture any swearing, but Leblanc and two other witnesses insist Hill was cursing at Jones.
The dispatcher hadn’t told the officers that Jones had mental health or addiction issues, something Stuart said Brantford police knew from Jones’ previous contacts with offi- cers and should have documented in his file. Instead, the dispatcher broadcast over the radio that the teen had been flagged as violent. Nonetheless, Hill realized on his own that Jones was likely suffering from a mental illness, according to his police notes. “I believed based on my experience that this male was suffering from a m/h (mental health) disorder,” he wrote in an all-caps scrawl.
Stuart was compiling a list of questions. There wouldn’t be a trial, but the lawyer would be able to question Hill at the coroner’s inquest into Jones’ death. Held after most policeinvolved deaths, these hearings have the look and feel of a court proceeding. The purpose is not to assign blame, but to examine the circumstances of a death and produce recommendations to prevent similar fatalities. In the vast majority of fatal police interactions no criminal charge is laid, meaning there’s no trial examining the circumstances. An inquest is the place these deaths are publicly examined, in detail. Families learn how their loved one died and hear from those involved, including officers. These are typically the most difficult and emotional days of testimony.
But in January 2012, three weeks before Jones’ inquest was set to begin, the lawyer for coroner Dr. Jack Stanborough announced Hill would not testify. The coroner had received a doctor’s report stating the officer could not take the stand for medical reasons. Stuart sent off a lengthy plea to the coroner stressing the importance of Hill’s in-person testimony. “The officer’s evidence lies at the centre of many, if not all, of the issues that the inquest is to address,” he wrote.
Among Stuart’s concerns was that, without Hill on the stand, the officer’s notes would be called upon — and their reliability was a “serious issue” given that they were completed “as per lawyer,” a notation written next to Hill’s initials. That would indicate they were prepared with the help of a lawyer, a practice since outlawed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Lawyers for Brantford police, however, argued that it was not a certainty that the lawyer helped Hill with his notes.
Stanborough ultimately ruled that it would be inappropriate to compel the officer to testify given his medical condition. He also ruled Jones’ family could not see the medical report explaining why Hill was unable to attend the inquest.
But even though Hill never took the stand, the inquest did give the family one major new piece of information: Hill’s name. In the nearly two years before the inquest, they hadn’t known who shot Jones, because of an SIU policy to not identify officers cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
Jones’ mother and sisters went home and Googled the officer. When old news articles came back, they were stunned to learn Jones wasn’t the first person Hill had fatally shot on the job.
Just eight months into his career as a police officer, in March 2006, Hill had been part of a hunt for Andrew Osidacz, a man who’d slit the throat of his 8-year-old son in one of Brantford’s most notorious murders. His cruiser’s sirens wailing, Hill rushed to the residence of Osidacz’s estranged wife, the boy’s mother. He heard screaming, pounded on the door, then rushed inside. Hill had testified at the coroner’s inquest into Osidacz’s death, and said he found blood smeared on the walls. Hearing a woman’s yells for help coming down the hall, Hill drew his firearm. He recalled that he and his partner, Const. Jordan Schmutz, sped into the bathroom to find Osidacz gripping his former wife, one arm wound around her, another holding a bloody butcher knife to her throat. Shaking, covered in blood and sweat, Osidacz said: “I’m going to kill her.”
Both officers fired; Osidacz was shot dead. The knife landed at Hill’s feet.
In Canada, it’s rare for a police officer to fire their gun — many cops make it through their entire career without ever drawing their weapon, never mind shooting it. Nationally, no government agency keeps statistics on deaths involving police. Provincially, the SIU has probed145 fatal shootings since its creation in 1990, or roughly five a year.
In the cases where an officer pulls the trigger, the psychological impact sets in within hours. A cop who has used lethal force will need support in processing the shooting; in some cases, he will have to overcome the stigma of being perceived as weak to get help. Symptoms will manifest in a variety of ways, including shaking, severe insomnia, and intense anxiety. The officer can feel fear, anger, sadness and grief. He may see everything and everyone as a threat. There may be flashbacks — an inescapable replay of the shooting like a movie clip. Police forces now know to provide support to officers immediately after a traumatic shift. But experts in first-responder mental health say some forces falter when it comes to longer-term support, leaving cops feeling isolated and abandoned.
After realizing Jones wasn’t the first person Hill had killed, Stuart attempted to learn what treatment he’d received from the Brantford Police Service after the 2006 incident, and whether the officer had been ready to go back to work, armed. The lawyer wondered if the sight of the knives in Jones’ hands could have brought Hill back to Osidacz’s shooting, and caused the officer to misperceive the threat and fire at Jones. “Whether it was a flashback, whether it was some kind of moment of crisis himself, I think that could be a factor in what was happening,” Stuart said. Having no information about whether Hill received long-term mental health treatment to put him back on duty after shooting Osidacz, Stuart tried to raise the topic during Jones’ inquest. But the subject was deemed outside the scope. “I would say there was a conscious effort,” Stuart said, “to not allow that into the inquest.”
Three months after the inquest, Stuart prepared a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of the Jones family. It alleged Hill had “significant undisclosed psychological trauma” but returned to active duty without a full psychiatric assessment or treatment. “As a result, no proper determination was made,” Stuart wrote, “. . . as to whether the trauma of this earlier incident impacted his ability to exercise the judgment required in his future duties as a police officer.”
A spokesperson for Brantford police said the service cannot answer questions about Hill’s treatment due to the ongoing lawsuit. In their response filed in court, Brantford police issued a blanket denial of all the allegations.
Leblanc continued to live in the same corner house. She refused to scrub off the footprint from Hill’s boot on the door, though the housing co-op finally replaced the bloodstained carpet. She couldn’t move, or move on. “I felt he was here,” she said of her youngest.
Like many relatives of people killed by police, Jones’ family became overnight private investigators. Emily and Jessie had rushed in with cameras as soon as the crime tape came down, taking photographs of every corner of the front hallway and living room. They’d held on to a broken TV that had been struck by a bullet, on the chance it would be relevant evidence. And they paid for a forensic study of the house — with measurements calculated by a laser — so lawyers could create a model of the hallway and living room in case Jones’ death went to court. After the shooting, the family found an imprint of a knife roughly five feet up the living room wall, near Jones’ gecko tank. How or when the indentation was made the night of the shooting has remained a mystery. Leblanc ripped out that section of the wall, a strange stucco fossil she now keeps in a cardboard box labelled “Evan.” She was home in January 2015 when she received an unexpected phone call. It didn’t last long. She could muster little more than a twoword response: “Thank God.”
Four years after the SIU cleared Hill in Jones’ killing, the watchdog was reopening the case. The SIU has rarely taken the extreme step in its 27-year history. The explanation was clipped. The decision was the result of “materially new information coming to light.”
“I absolutely did not want to shoot that guy. I had to.” CONST. ADAM HILL TO POLICE INVESTIGATORS
No one in Jones’ family had any sense of what that could be, and neither did Stuart. Though welcome, it was a puzzling development. Six days later, as Leblanc and her children were still absorbing the news, the SIU reopened a second Brantford death investigation.
On a January morning in 2009, Brantford police had been following a stolen vehicle to the banks of the Grand River. The suspect was a 32year-old named Benjamin Wood. He’d abandoned the car — left it running, cocaine inside — and made a run for it. Two Brantford officers in pursuit saw Wood lower himself over a railing and onto an embankment abutting the frozen water. A third officer went down to the river’s edge and caught up to him. After Wood became aggressive, the two men grappled with one another, then Wood slipped out of his own sweater to worm out of the cop’s grasp. Free, he ventured onto the thin ice, falling through. Hours later, a diving team found Wood’s body.
The SIU had cleared the officer in that death, too. The public never learned the officer’s identity because, oddly, no inquest was held. Ontario requires that such inquiries happen after most police-involved fatalities. But in this case, the coroner determined it wasn’t mandatory because Wood was not technically in police custody at the time he died.
Now the SIU was reopening the investigation for the same reason given in the Jones case: “Materially new information.”
Weeks, then months, went by with no news. Hope had buoyed the Jones family at first. “Finally, things are happening,” Jessie had written on her brother’s Facebook page a few months after the investigation was reopened. Jones’ still-active account, used periodically by friends and family yearning for connection with him, offers a timeline of Jones’ family’s transition to frustration. “We should be hearing back from the SIU soon . . . after a whole year!” Jessie wrote in early 2016. In July 2016, another update: “This year and a half wait better be worth it.”
Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Brantford police was stalled while the criminal investigation continued. It was all the family could talk about. What was taking so long? Each time Leblanc asked, she was told there was no new information to release. The issues, an SIU spokesperson said after the family complained, “are exceptionally complicated.”
When Hill walked into Brantford police headquarters in December 2014, he said he had “murdered” Jones and Wood, according to a detailed account of Hill’s utterances released by the SIU late last year. That news release was the first public confirmation that Hill had indeed been the officer who followed Wood down to the river’s edge, physically struggling with him immediately before Wood ran out onto the ice and drowned. Hill was now claiming he’d lied or omitted vital information during the original SIU investigations into both Wood’s and Jones’ deaths, telling two officers he’d recounted an untrue version to investigators at the prompting of the Brantford Police Association. He said he now feared God more than the SIU, according to the watchdog’s release. He claimed he was criminally responsible in their deaths.
“Given the enormity of these claims,” said Tony Loparco, the director of the SIU, “the SIU immediately commenced an investigation.”
In varying statements to colleagues, Hill claimed that before Wood broke through the ice on Grand River, he’d struck Wood on the head, telling one officer he’d hit him a number of times in a “heavyhanded” way. This, he said, was why Wood made the fatal decision not to return to the safety of the shoreline but instead ventured out onto the ice.
Meanwhile, Hill offered conflicting accounts about Jones’ death. To one officer, he’d stated he shot an unarmed man. To another, Hill said he was unsure whether Jones was armed at the time of the shooting, but afterward was relieved to see a meat cleaver near the teen’s body. To another, he’d claimed Jones was not coming toward him at the time of the shooting, but said a representative from the police union had counselled him to lie to SIU investigators and falsely claim the teen was advancing when he fired his gun.
When the SIU contacted Hill after reopening the Jones and Wood cases, the officer did not agree to be interviewed, as is his right. There would be no more talking.
Hill is believed to be the only police officer in the SIU’s nearly 30-year history to be investigated as the main player in three separate fatalities. In the last 15 years, only three people have died during an interaction with Brantford police. Hill was the officer in every case.
Early on a Friday in December 2016, a driver picked up Leblanc, Emily and Jessie in Brantford. Two years less a week after Hill’s police station utterances, the SIU had finished its reinvestigation. The unit had sent a car to bring Jones’ family to its nondescript headquarters in Mississauga to tell them the results, alongside Stuart. Nervous anticipation muted the ride. Leblanc and Jessie were convinced that Hill would be criminally charged; investigators had gone to all this effort, after all, so he had to be, they thought. Staring out the window at passing suburbs and farmland, Emily wasn’t so sure.
The investigation had hinged on Hill’s mental health. To determine whether to lay a criminal charge, such as assault or manslaughter, Loparco and his team had to ascertain whether the confessions were the result of a psychiatric crisis. The SIU had to turn to tactics rarely used in other cases. Three times, it obtained medical documents through a production order. It also consulted with a leading forensic psychiatrist.
Hill, the SIU later stated in its release, was “in the midst of a mental health crisis” when he made his statements. But after reviewing the medical files, the psychiatrist concluded that, despite Hill experiencing paranoid and religious delusions, his utterances appeared to have been unaffected, the family was told. In other words, the content of the statements themselves seemed to have come from an operating mind.
But the psychiatrist’s opinion had only been preliminary. For a deeper understanding of Hill’s state of mind, the SIU had sought to obtain additional medical documentation to cast greater light on his mental health history. However, Jones’ family was told the records had a high privacy interest, and Crown prosecutors had advised the SIU they would not be obtainable. As a result, Loparco made the decision to evaluate Hill’s utterances on their own, without the broader context.
That presented another problem. When Hill began spouting his utterances at the police station, none of the officers sought out audio or video equipment, meaning there was no recording of his words. Of the seven officers who’d heard Hill’s incriminating statements, only four took notes, and none had attempted to record what he said word for word. The SIU would have to rely on interviews with the seven officers to obtain Hill’s words, the most important evidence in the case.
But the SIU’s reinvestigation was already impaired by a late start. Eight days ticked by before Brantford police Chief Geoff Nelson reported Hill’s comments to the SIU, despite a law requiring that the agency be informed immediately when it has a clear reason to investigate. By the time the officers were interviewed by the SIU about Hill’s statements three and four months later, their memory had degraded.
Nonetheless, investigators were able to confidently determine no charge should be laid in Wood’s drowning death. Hill had claimed he’d struck Wood shortly before the drowning death. But the SIU found Hill’s claim was “flatly contradicted” — twice. Two eyewitnesses interviewed during the original SIU investigation said Hill did not strike Wood before he ran out onto the ice. More important still, a post-mortem examination found no skull fracture, bleeding or even bruising to Wood’s head.
Jones’ death, however, was different. Hill’s comments about the shooting could not be disproven by forensic evidence. But as they assessed the case, investigators determined that Hill’s statements about Jones wouldn’t pass muster in court. In order for the SIU to consider laying a criminal charge, the evidence supporting it must meet a high legal bar. If a charge is based on a statement to police, it must be accurate, reliable and complete to be admissible in court.
But Hill’s comments, as summarized by the officers, were “rife with inconsistencies” and unreliable. Hill had changed his story even while speaking to the same officer, telling one that Jones was unarmed when he shot him, then stating that he’d lied about the manner in which the teen had been holding the knife when he fired.
The officers’ failure to properly record Hill’s statements, however, was “fatal” to the issue of accuracy. It meant the SIU had far from a complete account of Hill’s words. If the officers had made audio or video recordings, Loparco told the family, then they could have warranted the scrutiny of a jury. Because Hill’s statements were not complete, accurate or reliable, the SIU could not even attempt to admit them into evidence. The shooting of Evan Jones remained legally justified. The watchdog closed the case again.
Leblanc, Jessie and Emily were stunned. Soon after the meeting’s end, they were chauffeured back to Brantford, the hour-long drive silenced this time by disbelief. To Stuart, it had sounded as though there might have been evidence to lay a charge “if the Brantford Police Service had done their job,” he said in an interview after the SIU meeting.
“It’s really quite amazing that someone could walk into a police station and confess,” he said, “and no one makes any record of that.”
Emily lives with her daughter, Alexis, now 9, in the same housing co-op where she grew up, a few doors down from where her brother died. In her living room, vivid paintings hang alongside more than a dozen photographs of Jones, many with Alexis, then a chubby toddler. For about a year after Jones died, Alexis looked around the house for “Evy,” but gradually the image of her playful uncle went out of focus. She hasn’t been told what happened. “I don’t know how you tell a child that,” Emily said.
It’s been a year since the SIU closed the case for the second time, but the sting is still fresh. “You would think, ‘OK, he confessed, they’re going to charge him,’ ” Emily said. “If it had been a civilian . . . ” Jessie jumped in to finish her sister’s sentence: “they would have been questioned, sat in a room, recorded.”
The family believes their lawsuit against Hill and Brantford police is the sole remaining route to justice. Since the SIU closed the case again, Stuart has made new allegations against the force, including that Chief Nelson broke the law by waiting eight days to report Hill’s incriminating statements to the SIU. The new claim also accuses officers of intentionally failing to capture Hill’s statements, motivated by a desire to protect their former colleague.
Baxter, the president of the Brantford police union, has a different explanation for his colleagues’ behaviour: compassion. Three of the cops who visited Hill in the hospital were off-duty, seeing a colleague, and could not have been expected to take notes or record, he said. Shortly after the SIU closed the reinvestigation, Baxter accused Loparco of “Monday morning quarterbacking” for criticizing officers for failing to record Hill’s comments, calling it an “extraordinary after-the-fact assumption.” Besides, Baxter said, “virtually everything (Hill) said that night was wrong.” He abjectly denied Hill’s claims that a police union representative had told him to lie to the SIU. The union “has never and would never counsel any member to break the law.”
Two months after the SIU closed the Wood and Jones investigations for a second time, the five-member Brantford police board met to review the officers’ conduct. They concluded they had rightly recognized Hill as a “member in distress” and exercised reasonable discretion by refusing to believe his comments were automatically criminal. “Officers are not required to use audio or video recording equipment when interacting with someone in the condition of (Hill), who was clearly in a state of mental health emergency,” the board said in a report. The board recommended that an amendment be made to Brantford police policy to direct on-duty officers to take notes and obtain advice from an inspector if they are confronted with a member making inculpatory statements.
The Brantford Police Service, too, said officers responded in a caring and professional way to a mental health crisis — Hill was “not under arrest, not under investigation,” said Acting Insp. Scott Williams in an email, responding on behalf of the service. The priority in all mental health situations is to ensure the person in crisis is provided proper health care, as was done in this case, he said.
“(Officers) demonstrated incredible professional integrity in reporting comments that were made during the crisis, and this same integrity was demonstrated by those who visited with their colleague in the days following,” he said. Williams did not respond directly to a question about what caused Nelson’s delay in notifying the SIU.
Brantford police also conducted a review of use of force that led to Wood’s and Jones’ deaths, concluding that Hill followed his training and behaved appropriately. Before Hill shot Jones, he had “continuously” attempted to de-escalate through communication. He then attempted less lethal force by using pepper spray, police said. “All officers conducted themselves properly,” a police board report said.
Hill remains a member of the Brantford Police Service, but has been absent from work for medical reasons since Jones’ 2010 shooting. Between 2012 and 2014, Hill had an ongoing complaint at Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal against the Brantford police and the city of Brantford, alleging employment discrimination due to disability. The complaint was later withdrawn and the details are not public.
Six months after he was cleared by the SIU for the second time, Hill wrote an entry on his Facebook page accusing the Brantford police of discrimination, claiming they have been “abusing” members with PTSD for years and considered the condition “bulls--t.” The Brantford Police Service denies the allegations contained in Hill’s post, saying the service works with health-care providers “to support its members who are dealing with medical disabilities including PTSD.” The Brantford police board, too, stated it is satisfied with the available support given to officers.
In his post, Hill intimated that more work needs to be done. He called for mental health challenges to be taken as seriously as physical disabilities, claiming to have been “harassed, abused, bullied, and threatened.” Hill said he’d been screaming out for support for years.
“My cries for help were not answered.” Wendy Gillis can be reached at wgillis@thestar.ca. This story was developed at the Banff Centre’s literary journalism residency.
“Adam is human, he has a heart, and having to shoot an 18-year-old boy left him heartbroken.” MARK BAXTER PRESIDENT OF BRANTFORD’S POLICE ASSOCIATION