‘I’m sorry ... we stole a car and we’re in a high-speed chase’
Police officers cleared after Cambridge pursuit ended with two teenagers dead
CAMBRIDGE — Two police officers have been cleared of wrongdoing after a high-speed chase ended with two teens dead in a horrific head-on collision last year.
The Highway 6 crash killed Nathan Wehrle, 15, of Cambridge and his girlfriend Taryn Hewitt, 16, of London.
Nathan was driving a red Pontiac G5, stolen days earlier from a Strathroy parking lot.
Fleeing police and driving too fast and aggressively on a curve, he lost control at up to 126 km/h, veered across the four-lane highway, and slammed head-on into a transport trailer hauling 41,500 kilograms of wheat. The truck driver survived.
Five minutes earlier, Taryn texted her mother Kate: “I’m so sorry for everything, we stole a car and we’re in a high-speed chase.”
Nathan’s father ,Tom Soloman, accepts the verdict on Waterloo Regional Police, after reading details of the year-long investigation by Ontario’s Spe- cial Investigations Unit.
“They did go by proper procedures,” he said. “You can’t blame them for it.”
Taryn’s father, Steve Hewitt, rejects the finding.
“Nobody’s ever found guilty,” he said. “It still ended in the
death of my daughter and nobody’s ever held accountable. They just blame Nathan.”
Soloman knows his son chose not to stop for police. Nathan was a teen with a temper whose poor choices helped put him into government care.
Both fathers want the government probed over its supervision of Nathan, who had been placed in up to three cities in different settings after his behaviour overwhelmed his parents.
Relatives argue Nathan was moved too often and allowed to chase disaster until he found it.
Nathan was “clearly a troubled young man in a difficult situation. He was driving a stolen car, had assaulted his girlfriend, and was fleeing from the police,” SIU director Tony Loparco found.
Nathan was an inexperienced driver. Before he crashed he tried to thread the needle at 120 km/h, going between two lanes of traffic going in opposite directions.
This made “losing control of his vehicle, and a collision, almost inevitable,” Loparco found.
Officers were planning a “rolling block” to stop the fleeing car on Highway 6. But they were still behind the car at a distance not fully determined.
“I am unable to establish that there was a causal connection between the actions of both subject officers and the catastrophic collision,” Loparco concluded.
“Tragically, the collision occurred before any of their plans to safely stop the Pontiac could be successfully deployed.”
“This is a very tragic incident for everyone involved,” said Insp. Mark Crowell, of Waterloo Regional Police.
“Our thoughts go out to the family, friends and loved ones of the two young people who lost their lives that day. Our thoughts also go out to the involved police officers impacted by this tragic incident.”
The SIU is a civilian agency that investigates incidents involving police that result in death or serious injury.
It released its report Friday on the one-year anniversary of the crash, after reconstructing the chase and collision and interviewing 19 civilian witnesses.
The SIU found that officers chased the car not because it was stolen, but because they feared the female passenger might have been abducted by the driver.
Concern for her safety outweighed the risk to public safety, justifying the chase by law and police policy, the SIU concluded.
Officers did not know they were chasing youths. Strathroy police issued a crime alert three days earlier naming Nathan as a suspect in the Pontiac theft but police didn’t check for his name during the chase.
The abduction claim came from a man who called 911 and then followed the Pontiac, after witnessing an altercation between the young couple just after 9 a.m. at Tommy’s Pizza on King Street East in Preston.
The SIU found evidence from a surveillance video and from another witness disputing the abduction claim.
“I’m just witnessing a man beating the living daylights out of a young lady,” the man told a 911 operator.
The witness described the couple as being in their 20s. He said the man forced the woman into the car. He said the man punched her in the head several times with his fist.
He said the woman dove head first into the Pontiac through the open driver’s window.
At one point while following them, he saw the woman crying in the car. He said he had a clear view of her in the passenger seat with a distressed look on her face that indicated: “Help me.”
He told an operator the man “let her have it.”
The couple’s altercation went on for many minutes, and was also caught by a camera at the pizza shop.
Video shows the couple struggling and tussling, the SIU reports. Nathan violently threw Taryn away from the car at one point. At another point he forcibly pulled her out of the car, pushing her to the ground.
It appears he wanted to keep her out of the car. She wanted to get inside it.
Loparco did not see Nathan punching Taryn in the head on the video. But it does reveal that he pushed her forcefully away from himself and the car.
“The video appears to show that (Taryn) was forcing her way back into the car on a couple of occasions, while (Nathan) was trying to keep her out of the vehicle rather than the other way around,” Loparco found.
A different witness also perceived the altercation as Nathan attempting to keep Taryn out of the car. That witness “did not think the situation warranted calling the police,” the SIU reports.
The couple eventually drove off together. The witness followed them in a white Dodge Journey while staying on the line with police.
Police chased the couple based on the claims of the 911 caller. Loparco concluded he is a reliable, credible witness.
“There is no doubt in my mind that the description of an assault and possible abduction by a wellmeaning” witness led police to launch the chase, Loparco found.
“The police decision to begin the pursuit was initially as a result of a reasonable belief that the driver of the vehicle had committed a violent assault and was involved in the continuing abduction of a frightened young woman,” he found.
“They were never given any information throughout the pursuit that could have changed that belief.”
Soloman has seen the altercation on video. It baffles him that the witness thought his son was trying to abduct Taryn. “Anybody could see that wasn’t the case, whatsoever. I’m just confused on how he thought the way he did,” he said.
Ontario’s chief coroner is looking into the deaths of both teens but has not decided whether to call an inquest.
Nathan’s death follows the death of a dozen other children in government care between 2014 and 2017. Those deaths have led an expert coroner’s panel to issue a scathing report calling for an overhaul of Ontario’s child protection system.
Government minister Lisa MacLeod has vowed changes in child protection. In the report, experts pointed to a lack of supervision and to children being moved around too often.