An explosive question: Why didn’t RCMP do more in 2013?

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 08/07/2015 (3746 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The explosive sound in the dark Dave Kane heard in the early morning of Dec. 13, 2013 probably would have woken him up.

But he was still reading at 3 a.m.

“It was like it shook everything,” he recalled Tuesday.

The sound was so loud that at first the now-retired railway worker thought the worst. His house north of Winnipeg, in the RM of St. Clement, is on the flight path of Richardson International Airport.

“I thought a plane had crashed,” Dave said.

But when he went outside into the cold he couldn’t see any evidence of an explosion.

It was a couple of days later before he figured out what basically had happened.

As Dave would come to understand it, the bomb had been placed in a neighbour’s mailbox — about 500 metres down the street from his house — and exploded at her front door.

More than a year-and-a-half later, RCMP are still trying to put the final pieces together on a case that has suddenly resurfaced in the most stunning of ways.

That’s because the house that was bombed in December 2013 was home to Iris Amsel, whose former husband, Guido Amsel, has been charged with attempted murder following a series of weekend package bombings, one of which seriously injured his ex-wife’s 38-year-old lawyer, Maria Mitousis. Another one was targeted for Iris Amsel and was intercepted by police at a business on Washington Avenue.

Kane recalled first seeing the Mounties in the neighbourhood two days after hearing the explosion.

“They were looking for shrapnel.”

When Dave asked Iris what happened, she pointed to charring on the bricks in front of her house and told him she couldn’t say anything.

Then, as the days passed, Dave noticed there weren’t any reports about the incident in the news, not even in the area’s local newspapers.

“At the time,” Dave said, “I thought I should phone somebody.”

Somebody in the media, he meant.

Yet, even today, Dave has difficulty believing Guido would be guilty of any of it.

“He’s so personable,” he said.

As an autobody company owner, though, Guido had a couple of other sides to his personality.

“Nobody could work for him because he was so fussy.”

But Guido was just as good to his customers as he was demanding of his employees.

“Customers were king,” Dave said.

And Guido treated his neighbours that way, too, often helping them with their car.

He was a popular guy on the street, and Dave liked him, too.

But then, over the years Guido was still living in the house with Iris and their then-young son, Dave became fond of the whole family.

He learned Guido had travelled to Manitoba first in the 1980s with the German military. Guido was a tank mechanic.

That’s how he lost two fingers, he told Dave. Guido returned home to Europe and married Iris. But by 2004, Guido had filed for divorce. And by the winter of 2014, a year after the bomb went off at the home they once shared, Guido and Iris had settled their divorce.

Dave had heard Guido was now married and shared two young children with his new wife. All the more reason for Dave to doubt Guido could have done what he’s accused of doing when he had so much to lose.

Yet, after the events of last weekend, Dave wonders, in retrospect, if he had contacted the media back when the bomb went off, might it have made a difference?

Probably not.

It wasn’t as if the RCMP would have had much to say to the media if they had been alerted and called.

The Mounties weren’t saying much on Tuesday.

They wouldn’t say if Guido Amsel was a suspect after the 2013 bombing, or if he was interviewed back then.

“The investigation is ongoing, and as such, we are unable to comment further at this time,” the RCMP said in a standard emailed response. All they would confirm is when and where their investigation began. And that the case concerned “a report of mischief where private property was damaged.”

Mischief?

Is that how the RCMP actually treated a bomb going off at the front door of a house where a woman was going through a nasty, protracted divorce?

In retrospect, it isn’t Dave Kane who should be wondering if he could have said or done more.

It’s the RCMP.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca