Father of girl shot with stolen police-issued gun wants answers from the RCMP

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This article was published 27/10/2015 (3691 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

When he picked up the phone to hear his daughter had been shot, a disbelieving Corey Vanderaa told police they had the wrong number.

His 16-year-old daughter, Calli, was sleeping over at her best friend’s house that Friday night. She’d asked him if she could go after he suggested they watch a movie together, joking, “You don’t want to lay around with your old dad anyways, right?”

Calli sent her dad a text message just after midnight — 12:06 — to let him know she and her friends were going out for Frosters. “I love you. Talk to you in the morning,” she’d written.

Forty minutes later, the phone jolted him out of bed, and he listened as the caller repeated the terrible news.

“’Corey Vanderaa? Calli Vanderaa’s dad?’ I’m like, ‘yeah.’ He’s like, ‘I don’t have the wrong number.’ ”

“I went into robot mode,” said Vanderaa, a single dad. “When I got to the hospital, I realized I was still in my pajamas.”

Calli had been with five of her friends, sitting in the rear passenger seat of a car parked in the Autumnwood Drive Mac’s convenience store parking lot, when a man she’d never met walked up and fired the gun through the back window. The bullet went into Calli’s chest, and she was rushed into surgery at Health Sciences Centre, where she’s still recovering.

“She’s stable, but she’s in rough shape,” her dad said Tuesday during a rare moment away from his daughter’s bedside since the shooting. “The pain she’s in, you can see it in her face.”

The bullet missed Calli’s heart but punctured her lung and damaged her colon and spleen. The Grade 11 student is worried she won’t be able to play basketball again, her dad said.

“Basketball is her life.”

The Winnipeg Police Service said Calli was an innocent victim and has laid criminal charges against two men, Matthew Wilfred McKay, 22, and Matthew Andrew Miles, 25. Investigators allege the two suspects broke into an RCMP officer’s car Friday night, stole the gun and then fired it in the convenience store parking lot a few hours later after getting into an argument with a group of youths. McKay is charged with two counts of attempted murder, theft under $5,000, mischief under $5,000 and several weapons charges. Miles is charged with two counts of theft under $5,000 and numerous weapons charges.

Vanderaa said he doesn’t think there was even a conversation before the shooter fired, noting police told him they viewed brief security footage. He said police told him the shooter was participating in a gang initiation ritual that night.

Vanderaa said his family has no gang involvement whatsoever.

“She’s not a bad kid,” he said, choking up. “It’s brutal.”

Vanderaa said he’s concerned the gun used to shoot his daughter may have been police-issued. He’s not after punishment for the officer, but he wants to know whether the Mounties’ policies were followed.

“I want an answer from the RCMP,” he said.

A retired RCMP officer says the off-duty Mountie who left his service weapon inside his marked police vehicle overnight “has a lot of explaining to do” after the gun was stolen and linked to the shooting.

Retired RCMP officer Garry Clement, who spent 30 years with the Mounties before he retired as superintendent in Ontario in 2003, said it’s against the force’s rules to leave firearms unattended in vehicles, and they must be secured in locked boxes that are sometimes bolted to the inside of the police vehicle’s trunk. When he was with the RCMP, he said officers had to have written permission to take their weapons home.

“There’s no reason for this. Law enforcement officers know they carry a weapon that has lethal consequences and it’s drilled into them right from Day 1… to make sure that firearm is secured in a proper manner at all times, so when these things happen, you know, the individual involved has a lot of explaining to do,” said Clement, who now works as a consultant and private investigator in Ontario.

“Unfortunately, we’re not talking about a walkie-talkie or something like that. This has lethal consequences. Without knowing all the facts of the case, the bottom line is it appears to me that it’s a terrible oversight on somebody’s part and, just on the surface, in violation of a lot of policies,” he said.

The RCMP has not commented publicly about the case or its weapon-storage policies, except to thank the Winnipeg Police Service for recovering the stolen gun. Police found the weapon when they searched a Keenleyside Street home in east Elmwood after an armed standoff with one of the suspects, who was eventually arrested Sunday morning. The second suspect was arrested later that day.

The Winnipeg Police Service continues to investigate the incident and said any consequences for the RCMP officer will be part of its investigation. The gun was stolen along with an equipment belt left inside the officer’s marked police vehicle, which was parked at his southeast Winnipeg home while he was off-duty Friday night.

Manitoba’s Independent Investigation Unit (IIU) has been notified but will not investigate because the case doesn’t fall within its general mandate to investigate serious injuries, deaths or breach of federal or provincial laws caused by police officers.

But University of Manitoba criminologist Frank Cormier said it would be appropriate for the IIU to investigate.

“I think the public should be concerned about how any police service stores their firearms and whether or not they’re taking every precaution possible to make sure that firearms don’t fall into the hands of criminals,” he said.

Vanderaa said he has been overwhelmed by the kindness of Winnipeg police officers, one of whom sat on the floor in a hospital hallway Saturday, waiting for word that Calli would be OK.

“It made me feel like actually, for once, somebody cared. Somebody went beyond the call of duty — that it wasn’t just about the job, that he knew that this little girl was an innocent little girl,” he said.

A longtime family friend set up a crowd-funding page to collect online donations for the family, and Vanderaa said he’s been overwhelmed by well wishes.

“The public support in this city is amazing,” he said.

As for the person who shot his daughter, “I’m waiting for the day that he has court. Because I got something to say to him.”

A Gofundme page has been set up for Calli.

katie.may@freepress.mb.ca