EDMONTON – An injured woman who alleges she was raped last Sunday said she was the one arrested when police responded to the rape complaint, according to her lawyer and a youth court worker.
The 18-year-old woman alleges she was kept in the Edmonton Remand Centre from Sunday until 11 p.m. Tuesday before she was taken to hospital to have a rape kit done – more than 48 hours after the alleged assault, said lawyer Parm Johal and court worker Mark Cherrington. She didn’t get a shower until Thursday, in part not to wash away any evidence of rape before the tests were done, in part because of conditions at the Remand.
“She was physically and sexually assaulted,” said Johal, who first met the young woman in court on Thursday. The woman’s face was swollen and bruised, and she was missing a tooth.
“She should have been taken to the hospital right away,” Johal said. “The Remand Centre should never have taken her in. … The police dropped the ball.”
The woman told Johal she had been drinking with her boyfriend and his mother at a west end hotel on Stony Plain Road Sunday, Feb. 17. When the couple had a fight and the boyfriend left, the young woman said two men and a woman she had befriended invited her to make some phone calls in their hotel room.
There, she said she was physically and sexually assaulted. She phoned her mother, who phoned the police, Johal said.
When the police ran the woman’s name through their computer system, they discovered she was on a youth probation order for a previous charge and hadn’t met part of her bail conditions.
When police picked her up, they charged her as an adult for breaching her probation order. She was soon in the Remand Centre, but wasn’t taken to hospital until Tuesday night, Johal said.
Afterward, she was taken back to the Remand, where she slept on a mattress on the floor of a cell because she was triple-bunked. She later told Johal the rape test came back positive.
Deputy chief Brian Simpson said the police department takes the allegations “very seriously” but that the arresting officers handled the file appropriately.
“Our initial review of this file indicates that police processes were followed correctly,” Simpson said Monday during a news conference.
A formal complaint hasn’t been filed, but because the allegations surrounding the case were made publicly, the police department has launched its own internal review into the file, Simpson said.
Two officers responded to the motel to check on the welfare of a woman there, Simpson said. Once the officers found her, EMS was called and the woman was treated at the scene, but said that the woman didn’t tell officers about a sexual assault.
Simpson said the woman was taken to the Remand Centre at 3:54 a.m. on Feb. 18 and didn’t report the sexual assault until 11:30 p.m. that night. She was taken to the Royal Alexandra Hospital about 30 minutes later, he said. A detective with the sexual assault section was assigned to the case and visited her at the hospital at 1:45 a.m.
“Based on the information given to officers responding at the time, their actions were appropriate,” Simpson said. “The followup actions taken when other information was given was also appropriate.”
But the victim’s lawyer said police should have been more concerned with finding suspects in a sexual assault file than with arresting her client.
“The message they’re sending out to victims of sexual assault is, ‘Don’t bother phoning the police if you’ve been sexually assaulted, if you have a warrant out for you or if you’re breaching your bail conditions because you know what’s going to happen to you? You’re going to be arrested as well,’” Johal said. “It was completely inappropriate for the police to be laying these charges on her.”
The charges of breaching bail conditions were withdrawn Feb. 22, according to court documents. She had been given a conditional discharge Oct. 3, 2011 for an assault, court documents say. Otherwise, the woman’s court record only shows shoplifting charges, which were either dropped or for which she was found not guilty.
Johal said she was also unable to speak with her client by phone while the woman was at the Remand Centre. Nor could Johal figure out why the woman wasn’t released right after the charges were dropped. The 18-year-old wasn’t released until 8:30 p.m. Friday.
When Johal questioned the shift supervisor, he said a new computer system called Orca wasn’t working properly and was losing people in the system.
“She’s not the only one treated like this. … They blame it on the computer system,” Johal said. “It’s a scapegoat. It’s appalling. … The police, the Remand Centre, need to be held accountable.”
Johal said she plans to launch a formal complaint against Edmonton Police Services and the province on behalf of the woman.
Michelle Davio, who speaks for Alberta Justice and the office of the Solicitor General, couldn’t speak about the woman’s case because of privacy legislation, but confirmed the Remand Centre moved to a new computer system over the Family Day long weekend. She denied that new system had created any problems.
“Corrections was really pleased with how the switch worked. There were no inappropriate retentions or releases,” Davio said. “Any claims that people were lost because of the new system? We don’t think they’re accurate. Any glitches there were, were resolved within an hour.”
Davio would not comment on why the young woman was brought to the Remand Centre in the first place.
Davio said Corrections will be conducting its own internal review of the allegations. The results of that review will not be made public.
With files from Paula Simons, Edmonton Journal
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