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Failure to safeguard
by Guest Fri 13 May 2016, 22:05
Alberta’s public examination into the suicide of Cpl. Shaun Collins offers glimpse inside sometimes secretive world of the Canadian Forces, Renata D’Aliesio reports
Gary Collins’s voice trembled, his face reddened, and tears pooled in his eyes as he began to talk about his only son inside a silent Edmonton courtroom. He had sat at a small wooden desk for four days, poring over thick binders of exhibits and listening to 11 Canadian Forces members and mental-health specialists testify at an unprecedented Alberta death inquiry. Now, it was his turn to speak. He took a deep breath and pressed on.
His son, Shaun, was a teenager when he joined the reserves, not long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sparked the Afghanistan war. Deploying twice to the battlefield – first as a reservist and then with the regular force – Corporal Collins returned from his second tour haunted by nightmares and flashbacks.
“Shaun seen and did things over there that were against everything we taught our kids to respect,” Mr. Collins told a group of mostly government lawyers gathered for the inquiry.
His son had been a caring young man. Mr. Collins recalled how he once bought a bus ticket to Fort McMurray for a panhandler trying to get to the oil-sands mecca. If only, he lamented, Edmonton military police had shown similar compassion on March 9, 2011, the night they arrested his son for allegedly driving drunk in a black SUV.
Within two and a half hours of that arrest, the 27-year-old corporal with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was found unconscious in a dark military cell, hanging from the metal-barred door. Cpl. Collins, who was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression, died in a hospital two days later.
The inquiry, the first ever in Alberta to zero in on a military death, has exposed disturbing cracks in military police practices, equipment and facilities and in the Forces’ mental-health-care system. The province’s police watchdog – the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team – and the military completed separate investigations into Cpl. Collins’s death, but their reports have not been publicly released. No criminal or military charges were laid in the case, a Canadian Forces spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Key breakdowns that came to light over four days of inquiry testimony included a lack of medical follow-up after Cpl. Collins asked for mental-health services after his second Afghanistan tour. Also, the military police team failed to adequately search the Forces’ security information database and so were not aware of the corporal’s previous suicide threats.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/inquiry-exposes-holes-in-canadian-forces-mental-health-caresystem/article30021281/
Gary Collins’s voice trembled, his face reddened, and tears pooled in his eyes as he began to talk about his only son inside a silent Edmonton courtroom. He had sat at a small wooden desk for four days, poring over thick binders of exhibits and listening to 11 Canadian Forces members and mental-health specialists testify at an unprecedented Alberta death inquiry. Now, it was his turn to speak. He took a deep breath and pressed on.
His son, Shaun, was a teenager when he joined the reserves, not long before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, sparked the Afghanistan war. Deploying twice to the battlefield – first as a reservist and then with the regular force – Corporal Collins returned from his second tour haunted by nightmares and flashbacks.
“Shaun seen and did things over there that were against everything we taught our kids to respect,” Mr. Collins told a group of mostly government lawyers gathered for the inquiry.
His son had been a caring young man. Mr. Collins recalled how he once bought a bus ticket to Fort McMurray for a panhandler trying to get to the oil-sands mecca. If only, he lamented, Edmonton military police had shown similar compassion on March 9, 2011, the night they arrested his son for allegedly driving drunk in a black SUV.
Within two and a half hours of that arrest, the 27-year-old corporal with the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry was found unconscious in a dark military cell, hanging from the metal-barred door. Cpl. Collins, who was being treated for post-traumatic stress disorder and clinical depression, died in a hospital two days later.
The inquiry, the first ever in Alberta to zero in on a military death, has exposed disturbing cracks in military police practices, equipment and facilities and in the Forces’ mental-health-care system. The province’s police watchdog – the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team – and the military completed separate investigations into Cpl. Collins’s death, but their reports have not been publicly released. No criminal or military charges were laid in the case, a Canadian Forces spokesperson said in an e-mail.
Key breakdowns that came to light over four days of inquiry testimony included a lack of medical follow-up after Cpl. Collins asked for mental-health services after his second Afghanistan tour. Also, the military police team failed to adequately search the Forces’ security information database and so were not aware of the corporal’s previous suicide threats.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/inquiry-exposes-holes-in-canadian-forces-mental-health-caresystem/article30021281/
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