Mountie charged with murder visited RCMP head’s home

John Nicol (CBC News) – The suspended Mountie charged in the December killing of Ottawa police officer Eric Czapnik had visited the home of the head of the RCMP last fall, following a pattern of going to the top when things weren’t working in his favour.

Kevin Gregson showed up at the Ottawa-area home of RCMP Commissioner William Elliott to drop off some material and did so “without incident,” RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Julie Gagnon confirmed to CBC.

The RCMP did not reveal the exact date of the visit last fall, but Gagnon said it was a violation of Gregson’s suspension, which prohibited him from contacting RCMP employees at their homes without being specifically invited.

Transcripts from Gregson’s court proceedings in Saskatchewan in 2002, 2005 and 2007 obtained by the CBC reveal this was not the first time Gregson had arrived at the doorstep of a supervisor. And they also provide details of his troubled life, in his own words.

According to the documents, Gregson in 2004 went to the home of his supervisor in Humboldt, Sask., when she first came to the detachment, to complain about former supervisors both there and at previous RCMP postings. When Gregson failed to get posted to the air marshal’s program, he complained to the head of the RCMP in Saskatchewan, “that he would deal with things in his own way,” after losing out on the job.
A career of conflict

The hundreds of pages of transcripts reveal a conflict-marred career, which started in 1998 in Kamsack, northeast of Regina. In his own words, Gregson speaks of his inability to control his anger. He worries about his potential for violence, whether it’s at home in a disintegrating marriage, or on the job, where he says he wanted to slap a supervisor in the side of the head or punish members of the public.

In his 2005 case, where he sought the return of his guns that were seized when the RCMP put him on “administrative leave,” he was asked about a litany of problems he had with colleagues and authority.

“So what do you understand the source of all this conflict to be?” asked Crown attorney Gary J. Parker.

“Myself,” Gregson replied.

When asked why, he said: “I don’t have very good coping mechanisms.”

Despite the concerns raised during testimony, and several discussions about his mental health, the court returned his firearms to him.
‘No one came by, no one even talked to me’: Gregson

In sometimes rambling testimony at the Oct. 31, 2005, hearing where he often slammed his colleagues, he joked that the administrative leave position they put him in meant they couldn’t fire him for five years. He readily acknowledged that detachments in Saskatoon, Melfort and Prince Albert did not want him.

So he stayed home for eight months — except for taking a domestic abuse course at the suggestion of his estranged wife and taking a trip to South Africa for five weeks to take a bodyguard course, though he admitted that he lied to the RCMP when he said he needed those five weeks to see his parents.

He told the hearing he was not receiving any psychiatric help, but was getting what he called “CMT therapy” — sitting home in front of the TV watching Country Music Television.

“Even when I was on my CMT duties, where I sat on my butt for all those months,” he said, “I just sat at home, no one came by, no one even talked to me.”
Training increased anger problem

He also made a blunt admission that he was greatly affected by an air protective officer program he attended: “I was messed up to begin with, but in the program, it’s a covert, it’s a secret unit, but one of the things they do is, they do mental and psychological conditioning to make you extremely aggressive when required.”

Upon returning to work, which was then at the Cumberland House detachment in Saskatchewan, he told his sergeant that this training, combined with his own anger, made it impossible for him to work.

“I went to one call and I wanted to put a person through a fridge, and I never felt that way or been like that before,” he said.

“And then another time I was jogging, and there’s eight guys and they’re all sitting around drinking beer, and they started mocking me and I wanted to go over and knock the crap out of ‘em.”

In 2002, during his stint in Cumberland House, he was charged with two counts of assault on a drunken man taken from his home to be placed in the police drunk tank.

Despite his police partner testifying against him, Gregson was acquitted.
Pleaded guilty to uttering death threat

Gregson’s most striking words from his 2007 court case — in which he was charged with four counts, including threatening a Mormon bishop with a 10-inch knife — come from the testimony of the bishop, Robert Howie.

The bishop testified: “He then said to me, ‘I’m messed up. You don’t know how messed up I am. I’m afraid all the time that I’m going to have psychological testing soon at work and I will lose my job.’”

Gregson pleaded guilty in a Regina court to uttering a death threat against the bishop, but received a conditional discharge when his lawyer persuaded the judge that cysts in Gregson’s brain had contributed to his behaviour.

The RCMP acted more aggressively to try to remove him from the force, but it was only after Gregson visited Commissioner Elliott’s home in Ottawa last fall that he was given an ultimatum in November: resign or be fired. Gregson appealed that ruling.

Czapnik was attacked and stabbed to death around 4:30 a.m. on Dec. 29 while sitting in his cruiser taking notes outside the emergency department on an unrelated police matter. There was no known connection between the suspect and Czapnik, 51, a father of four who had been with the force since April 2007.