Mounties on sleds get their man
In a quintessentially Canadian crime scene, Mounties in the Melville area turned to sleds for the hot pursuit of a cold suspect this week.
The incident began when the Melville/Ituna RCMP detachment received a complaint around 11 a.m. Monday of a theft of six cartons of cigarettes from a business in Ituna, about 160 kilometres northeast of Regina. A man had fled the scene on foot and ran into a nearby field.
But for an alternative mode of transportation, the Mounties might not have got their man.
“The snow was quite deep,” Const. Jamie Tait said in an interview Wednesday.
The detachments of Melville/Ituna and Broadview share two RCMP snowmobiles.
“It just so happened that we happened to have them at the time, and the need arose,” she said.
With an officer on each snowmobile and three other officers “on containment” — keeping watch in the area — a suspect was tracked across a field for some six kilometres before he was found and arrested.
Once the sleds hit the field, the incident was brought to an end fairly quickly.
While the temperatures were mild that day, the suspect was still cold and exhausted from his getaway attempt, according to the RCMP.
“The most important part is that he was arrested without incident,” added Tait.
A 35-year-old man was charged with theft and breach of an undertaking.
The two sleds used in the snowspeed chase are part of F-Division’s fleet of snowmobiles, the number of which wasn’t available Wednesday. RCMP members must take additional training in order to operate them, but the chance to put it to use in the field of duty in this sort of situation isn’t common.
“It’s something that doesn’t happen very often, but the need arose and we seized the opportunity,” said Tait.
According to RCMP spokeswoman Mandy Maier, RCMP snowmobiles are more commonly used for searching for impaired snowmobilers, patrolling snowmobile trails, conducting search and rescue in remote areas, responding to snowmobile collisions and attending snowmobile rallies to watch for impaired drivers and do community outreach.
Currently, F-Division — Saskatchewan — has 629 members with snowmobile training.
The force first began offering a snowmobile operators’ course in 1990 and revised it in 2006. “It’s a national training standard, so it’s the same across all the divisions,” Maier said.