Neal Hall (Vancouver Sun) – An RCMP officer who was present during the 2007 death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver’s airport has been ordered to stand trial for an unrelated criminal charge stemming from a fatal car accident.
Cpl. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson, 41, is accused of obstruction of justice after being involved in a 2008 accident in Delta that killed motorcyclist Orion Hutchinson, 21.
A preliminary inquiry was held this week in Surrey Provincial Court, where the judge ordered Robinson to stand trial.
The officer has elected to be tried by a judge and jury. He will appear May 19 in B.C. Supreme Court in New Westminster to fix a trial date.
Hutchinson was killed the night of Oct. 25, 2008, when his motorcycle was struck by a Jeep driven by Robinson, who was off duty at the time.
After the accident, the officer claimed he walked to his nearby home and had a couple shots of vodka, then returned to the scene of the accident.
He was arrested and gave two breathalyzer samples.
Robinson was the senior officer on duty when Dziekanski, 40, died at Vancouver International Airport after he was repeatedly shot with an electronic stun gun on Oct. 14, 2007.
Thomas Braidwood, the retired judge who headed a public inquiry into the tragedy, found the four officers mishandled the situation by approaching Dziekanski as though they were dealing with a pub brawl instead of a distraught and exhausted visitor who had spent more than 10 hours in the airport after arriving from Poland. The Crown found no wrongdoing on the part of the officers.
There may be very valid reasons why this matter took 2 1/2 years to get to the point of a trial being ordered. I hope we eventually learn what those reasons are. I also hope we learn why the Crown apparently didn’t agree with the Delta PD charge recommendations made in June 2009. Was the Delta investigation incomplete in some way? Was further investigation or analysis necessary? And what the heck has been going since Robinson was actually charged in December 2009?
Theoretically the Delta PD investigators would have tried to establish whether Robinson was legally impaired when his vehicle collided with Mr. Hutchinson’s. They would have attempted to obtain a statement from Robinson to ascertain what and when he ate and drank prior to and after the collision and then had a lab crunch the numbers, taking Robinson’s body weight into consideration. They would also have attempted to determine if Robinson’s story about running home and pounding down a couple of shots was true or not and to trace where he was and what he was doing prior to the collision. If Robinson was non-cooperative after his first blurted comments to police these tasks would have been difficult. Accordingly we may never know for certain if Robinson was legally impaired at the time of the collision.
I am however pleased that a charge of Obstruction has been laid although that charge was not recommended by Delta. It speaks to the facet of this tragedy that has most inflamed the public: Robinson’s actions at the scene of the collision and what they tell us about the type of man he is. Faced with a badly injured civilian his immediate response was to scuttle away and attempt cover his own ass. His decision to down two shots of vodka (assuming his story is true) is a not uncommon ploy of impaired drivers that Robinson would certainly have been cognizant of. His first thought was to protect himself.
Hopefully a conviction by the courts will give the RCMP the ammunition they apparently require to fire him.