Image credit: IIO BC

By Aaron Schulze

IIO INVESTIGATION

Merritt RCMP members not responsible for 2023 triple-fatal collision near Logan Lake: police watchdog

Nov 14, 2024 | 11:02 AM

LOGAN LAKE, B.C. — B.C.’s police watchdog says Merritt RCMP officers were not criminally responsible for a collision that killed three people outside of Logan Lake last year.

According to a decision released by the Independent Investigations Office of B.C. (IIO) Thursday (Nov. 14), Merritt RCMP responded to a report of a trashed hotel room at around 8:30 a.m. on July 23, 2023, where they found a man who was described as “zombie-ish” by witnesses.

The Merritt officers noted there had been mental wellness checks on the man and he stated he suffered from paranoia and anxiety. According to the IIO, the officers were trying to verify whether he was suffering from mental health issues but didn’t see evidence he was planning to harm himself, which wouldn’t meet the criteria for arresting him under the Mental Health Act.

Nearly an hour-and-a-half after seeing the Merritt officers, the man was involved in a fatal collision on Highway 97D outside Logan Lake at around 11:30 a.m.

Logan Lake RCMP say the man was as fault for the collision, and he had a THC level above the legal driving limit. RCMP determined the man was driving recklessly in the wrong lane and struck a vehicle head-on, killing the other driver, their passenger and himself.

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In the decision, Chief Civilian Director Jessica Berglund says an officer is not held to a legal standard of perfection when making assessments about a person’s mental health or impairment.

“There is no evidence to confirm or refute whether the [man] consumed drugs or whether his mental health deteriorated between his last contact with police and the collision, but it remains a possibility,” Berglund writes. “In these circumstances, the officers’ decisions were reasonable, and do not constitute a marked and substantial departure from the appropriate standard of care required in the circumstances.”

The full report can be found here.