Canadian Mountie Stands Trial for Horrific Child Abuse Case

Most Americans have some fairly silly ideas about what life is like for Canadians. The reality of the matter, is that Canada is a developed nation that isn’t all that different from our own. They lead normal lives under a system that has many of the same pros and cons that ours has, and that includes their system of law enforcement.

If there’s one problem that every police department in the world has to come to terms with, it’s that their profession tends to attract horrible people. Even a police department with immaculate standards and a thorough vetting process, will still end up hiring someone from the dregs of humanity. It’s an unavoidable fact of life when your profession involves exerting power and authority over other people, because evil people love power and authority more than well-adjusted folks do, and they’re much more capable of attaining it.

Canadian police departments are no different of course. One of their Mounties, along with his wife, are currently on trial for abusing their child in chilling ways.

In court Friday, the Mountie watched his own police interview that occurred following the arrest, as the trial reached a fourth day.

The father asked the interviewing Ottawa police officer whether his son would be reunited with his family. The officer told him he didn’t have to explain the charges, adding the Mountie knew the law and the criminality of what had happened.

“I screwed up,” the father told the officer during the interview.

In the police interview the father admitted he tethered his son to the wall or a pole in the basement. The boy developed scabs on his wrists due to the chains or plastic zip ties used to confine him in the basement, the father said.

Signs of ‘wasting and severe malnutrition’

The boy, who in 2013 appeared emaciated and starved when doctors examined him at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario had been fed despite doctors’ opinions to the contrary, his father assured police.

The court examined 160 photos of the then 11-year-old taken upon his admission to CHEO.

Dr. Leigh Fraser-Roberts testified the boy weighed just 50 lbs. when he was admitted, and gained about 15 lbs. after two and a half weeks of treatment.

According to the boy’s testimony, these weren’t the only crimes he had to endure. He was frequently stripped of his clothes and confined to a pitch black basement during Ottawa’s winter months, nearly asphyxiated as he was dunked in ice, forced to consume his own bodily wastes, and sexually assaulted.

The pediatric doctor who first treated the boy when he was admitted to the hospital, said that he only weighed 50 lbs when he arrived, and was covered in lesions and scars. In her 22 years as a doctor, she claimed that it was “by far the worst case of inflicted injury, abuse or neglect in a child who managed to survive.” Despite some of the admissions made by the Mountie and his wife, they have since pled not guilty, and their defense has claimed that the boy was actually anorexic.

Make no mistake, there are some seriously twisted people in law enforcement, and it probably doesn’t matter which country you live in. The only thing that differs from country to country, is how these people are treated once they’re caught. Hopefully, Canada’s court system will do the right thing, and not just leave this man with a slap on the wrist like they do in America.