SET MY HERO COP FREE
Casino employee held hostage by former co-worker says police officer who fired fatal shot in ensuing standoff should not be charged with murder
Tetiana Piltsina says the police officer who shot and killed her coworker who had taken her hostage is a “hero,” and shouldn’t have been charged with murder.
“This young policeman has to be released from all these accusations. It’s so unfair,” said Piltsina, speaking for the first time since the November 2012 incident.
The incident began in the early morning of Nov. 8 as Piltsina was on her way to work at the Starlight Casino in New Westminster. She was attacked in the casino parking lot, she said, and held by her former coworker and ex-boyfriend, 48-yearold Mehrdad Bayrami.
The situation escalated into a fivehour police standoff that ended when cops fatally shot Bayrami.
Following a probe by B.C.’s police watchdog, the Independent Investigations Office of B.C., Crown counsel approved a charge of seconddegree murder in October 2014 against Delta police Const. Jordan MacWilliams.
But Piltsina says she was never interviewed by police or the IIO, despite her attempts to contact them and give her perspective on what happened that morning.
The B.C. Police Association, as well as some former officers, are now raising concerns about the IIO’s failure to interview Piltsina, and the Crown’s decision to approve a murder charge against the cop.
Association president Tom Stamatakis with murder is “outrageous.”
“This is a guy who’s responding to a call the way his department and the public would expect him to respond. He’s doing what he was trained to do in those circumstances,” he said.
“On the issue of the victim not being interviewed, that, if it’s true, is very troubling. That’s a pretty standard step to take in any investigation.
“At this point, I’m pretty disappointed in the Crown for going the route that they’ve gone,” Stamatakis said. “I worry because I think that it’s a pretty scary decision for the average front-line police officer ... I think it increases the risk to the public.”
Crown spokesman Gordon Comer said Monday: “This prosecution is now before the court, and out of respect for that process, the Criminal Justice Branch will not comment on the specifics of the case ... ”
IIO spokeswoman Kellie Kilpatrick couldn’t confirm information about which specific witnesses had been interviewed or not.
“Our focus is on the actions of the police officers, not of the affected people, who in this case is Mr. Bayrami,” Kilpatrick said.
She added that while the matter was before the court she was “not able to provide a comment specifically on what investigative steps were taken.”
Piltsina said she believed MacWilliams was “definitely a hero.”
“They risk their lives for us,” she said. “He was doing his job.”
Piltsina said Bayrami accosted her in the parking lot that morning, grabbed her and dragged her away at gunpoint. Emergency crews responded to a 911 call of shots fired.
Piltsina, who had known Bayrami for years, said he was unstable and she feared for her life at that time.
Bayrami held Piltsina at gunpoint for an hour or two, she said, before she was able to escape, and police removed her from the scene. The standoff continued for a few more hours before police shot Bayrami, who died in hospital 10 days later.
Before Piltsina was able to break free from Bayrami, he kept talking to her, she said this week.
“He was just saying awful things. He said to me: ‘I don’t want to go to prison ... I know that I’m going in a plastic bag from here,’ ” she said. “What he meant is he was probably ready to die.”
Leo Knight, a former RCMP and Vancouver police officer, said: “When he says, ‘I know I’m leaving here in a plastic bag,’ that speaks to his state of mind. It tells you that he was either planning a suicide or a suicide-by-cop, which means he knew he was going to point his gun at police.”
Interviewing Piltsina could have provided investigators and the Crown with “critical” insight into Bayrami’s state of mind the morning of the shooting, said Knight, who now writes about justice issues on his blog, primetimecrime.com. “Surely the Crown should have had that information in deciding whether to approve a charge against the police officer,” Knight said.
In November 2014, weeks after MacWilliams was charged with murder, Bayrami’s daughter, Nousha Bayrami, filed a lawsuit in B.C. Supreme Court, naming MacWilliams and the Corporation of Delta as defendants.
The notice of civil claim alleges that Nousha Bayrami “has suffered pecuniary loss as a result of the wrongful death of her father, Mehrdad Bayrami, and has been deprived of his love, care, guidance and support” and alleges MacWilliams is “guilty of gross negligence or malicious or wilful misconduct.”
The civil claim’s version of events alleges that while “Bayrami was walking backwards away from the peace officers with both arms by his sides, the defendant, Jordan MacWilliams, suddenly, without warning or justification, unlawfully shot Mehrdad Bayrami.”
Piltsina said that for months after the 2012 incident she wondered why police didn’t contact her.
“I was thinking what’s going on? Nobody’s calling me,” she said.
She hoped to put the whole ugly incident behind her. But when she learned late last year that MacWilliams was facing a murder charge, she wanted to share her story, so she contacted the police and the IIO. In the months that followed, she said, she never heard back.
The IIO’s failure to interview Piltsina raises concerns about the police watchdog’s probe into the shooting and the subsequent murder charge laid against MacWilliams, said Bob Cooper, a retired Vancouver police detective who worked in the Internal Investigation Squad.
“Not only is there no reason not to interview the hostage, but there is every reason to do so,” Cooper said. “If there’s an explanation here I’d love to hear it, though I’d be hard-pressed to imagine what it is.”
The matter was made worse, Cooper said, by the fact that Piltsina said she tried to reach out to investigators, and still no one talked to her. The fact that MacWilliams had already been charged when Piltsina reached out doesn’t mean that investigators shouldn’t talk to her, he said.
“The first thing I learned as a detective is that we were ‘seekers of the truth’ and it’s never too late to find it or admit you made a mistake. The secret fear that we all carried with us but never spoke out loud about was charging an innocent man.
“The need to keep an open mind and avoid tunnel vision was drummed into us constantly,” Cooper said.