An Ontario Provincial Police officer will not face charges in connection with a bizarre incident involving a high speed pursuit that resulted in a head-on collision and the theft of a police cruiser with a baby inside.
The province’s police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit, said the officer was parked on the shoulder of Highway 407 in Brampton in a marked cruiser enforcing the speed limit on Jan. 8, when a vehicle approached his car from behind at a high rate of speed.
The vehicle was reportedly recorded driving 152 km/h in a 100 km/h zone and the officer then attempted a traffic stop. The SIU said the officer was driving about 80 km/h to allow the vehicle to pass him, when he noticed it had slowed down and made a U-turn before speeding away on the opposite lanes of the highway.
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The officer then turned on his siren and pursued the driver, who had exited the highway via the Highway 410 on-ramp, but came upon a major head-on collision around 30 seconds later.
The SIU said two men then ran from the vehicle that caused the collision and one of them was carrying a baby in his arms.
A foot chase ensued and the man carrying the baby then doubled back to the collision scene and the SIU said he locked himself inside the police officer’s cruiser with the baby.
The SIU said the suspect then drove away from the scene in the cruiser while dragging the officer for a short period of time.
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The officer then noticed a seven-year-old child wandering near the collision scene and tended to her before discovering the 37-year-old female passenger of the other vehicle in the head-on collision was seriously injured. Paramedics arrived on scene and rushed that woman to hospital.
“The subject officer did absolutely nothing that could even remotely be considered to be a causal contribution to the woman’s injuries,” SIU Director Tony Loparco said in a release.
“He was acting lawfully when he attempted to initiate a routine traffic stop, and the extraordinary events that followed were completely unforeseeable.”
Loparco added the investigation determined the collision occurred before the officer had arrived on scene in pursuit and “did nothing to exacerbate the man’s egregiously dangerous driving.”
The SIU is an arm’s length agency that investigates reports involving police where there has been death, serious injury or allegations of sexual assault.
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