by Gary Dimmock
Ottawa Citizen
The father of an 11-year-old boy reported missing on the night of Feb. 12, 2013 portrayed his son as “out of control” and warned a responding police constable that she might find bruises on his body because “I lose it sometimes,” an Ottawa court heard on Wednesday.
Ottawa police Const. Cindy Cybulski had responded to a report that a neighbour had found the missing boy, who was complaining of back pain and sitting slumped in snowbank on a darkened Kanata street. The boy’s father approached the officer and detailed a sad story about the hardships of raising a problem child.
The officer testified that at first she sympathized with the father, saying “as a parent, I was devastated … I was really feeling for this guy.”
She comforted him with a hand on the shoulder.
But when the father said his son was so hard to handle he had to tie him up, Cybulski went to check on the “tiny” boy, now in the back of a brightly-lit ambulance where she saw the child’s emaciated condition.
“It was like a concentration camp movie. His chest was just bones, you could see every rib,” Cybulski testified before Superior Court Justice Robert Maranger.
The boy had gouges on his wrists and ankles and he said they were “from the chains,” the officer testified.
It was at that moment that the constable broke into tears on the stand, saying “and a minute earlier I just wanted to give him back to his dad.”
She arrested the father. On the way to the station, the father said he was an RCMP officer who worked on the force’s counter-terrorism unit, according to the constable’s testimony.
The boy’s parents are accused of keeping the boy shackled and handcuffed six months. Both are charged with aggravated assault, forcible confinement, and failure to provide necessities of life.
The boy’s father, a suspended Mountie, is also charged with sexual assault causing bodily harm, and three counts of assault with a weapon (handcuffs, wooden stick, and a BBQ lighter). The boy’s stepmother, 36, is also charged with assault with a weapon (wooden spoon).
There is a court-ordered ban on any information that could reveal the boy’s identity.