A senior bureaucrat in the provincial government says nothing could have been done differently by authorities in their dealings with Randy Crosson that would have saved Nona McEwan’s life.
“From the perspective of our responsibility, no, I really don’t think there was,” said Simon Glen, deputy provincial director for B.C. community corrections in the Ministry of Public Safety and Solicitor General. “Our clients do bad things, and every time that happens we look and see were there opportunities, were there learnings, and it’s really easy in hindsight when you know the eventual outcome to sort-of say yes, we could have made this decision differently or we could have done something differently.
“When I look at this case, even knowing the eventual outcome, I don’t see decisions that we could have made differently that would have resulted in anything different.”
Glen is responsible for oversight of all probation officers across the province. He testified Tuesday at an inquest into the deaths of of the couple, both shot dead by Emergency Response Team police during a 2019 hostage-taking in Whalley where Crosson held his girlfriend, McEwan, hostage. Coroner Margaret Janzen presided over the inquest in Burnaby, at Coroners’ Court, with a jury of four women and a man hearing testimony. The inquest was stood down on Wednesday morning for jury deliberations and will resume when it reaches a verdict.
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Probation officer Rob Ryhorchuk testified last week that he was assigned to Crosson’s case in 2015 after Crosson was convicted of robbery. Crosson’s criminal history began in 1996, primarily involving break-ins, theft, assault, carrying a weapon and numerous convictions for failing to comply with court orders.
In 2003, he was convicted of assaulting McEwan and released on probation. “His explanation of the offence to his supervising probation officer at that point was that he threw a sandwich,” Ryhorchuk tetified.
A Surrey-based police watchdog – the Independent Investigations Office – in 2020 found the RCMP’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) blameless in the shooting deaths of McEwan, 45, and Crosson, 48, whom authorities say was holding McEwan against her will in her rented home. The standoff saw roughly two dozen police vehicles, as well as an armoured vehicle, surround her home in a cul-de-sac near 132A Street and 100A Avenue.
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McEwan was killed when she was struck by two police bullets as ERT officers fired on Crosson, who held a large knife to her throat and had “what appeared to be” a gun in his hand. Forensic police later found a “realistic-looking” replica pistol between the bed and the wall. Crosson was pronounced dead at the scene and McEwan died on the way to hospital.
Ron MacDonald, chief civilian director of the IIO, also testified Tuesday at the inquest.
“The circumstances that were in play, it’s understandable that they took the action they did. In hindsight, was there other ways to do it? The key there, though, is the clock’s ticking, but they had basically run out of time,” he told the coroner and jury.
“The time limit that he artificially created made a lot of difference, and then it went from the hour down to the five minutes down to like two minutes, one can understand that the action they took, why they took it. In that sense, I can’t say it was unreasonable.”
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That Crosson had a replica gun was immaterial to the outcome, MacDonald opined.
“He knew what he was doing was wrong,” he testified. “He’s the one that caused her death…the fact that it wasn’t a real gun was immaterial, it looked like a real gun, he was talking about it like a gun. He had previously set off a bear-banger which made it seem like he had a gun.”
“In an ideal world, not as many shots would have been taken,” MacDonald told the inquest. “They didn’t have a choice, they had to go in.”
MacDonald concluded in his 2020 investigation that McEwan died because of Crosson’s actions, as he held her against her will in her home, threatened her life, “and provoked an armed response from the police aimed at saving her.” His actions, MacDonald said, “made it inevitable that officers would fire on him when they broke into the bedroom, and who held her in front of him as a shield against police bullets.”
Accordingly, he found, “I do not consider that there are reasonable grounds to believe that an officer may have committed an offence under any enactment and therefore the matter will not be referred to Crown counsel for consideration of charges.”