By Tony Spears
Ottawa Sun
It was only in the brightly lit ambulance that Const. Cindy Cybulski could truly see the trauma wrought upon the frail body of an 11-year-old boy.
“It was like a concentration camp movie,” she told a court Wednesday. “His chest was just bones. You could see every rib.”
Cybulski, a veteran Ottawa police officer, seemed shaken as she catalogued the boy’s injuries.
His arms and wrists had “scabs upon scabs,” she said — fresh, raw wounds atop older, healing gouges. His ankles were no better.
How did this happen, she’d asked the boy.
“From the chains,” he told her. She gave the answer before defence lawyer Robert Carew could object to the hearsay evidence.
Cybulski took the stand at the child-abuse trial of a 44-year-old RCMP counter-terrorism officer and his 36-year-old wife, who are accused of keeping the boy shackled in their Kanata home.
On Feb. 12, 2013, Cybulski had responded to a call about a missing boy. She’d gone to the home of the neighbours, who’d found the boy sitting in a snowbank.
Even in the dim evening twilight, she could see something wasn’t right. His eyes and temples were sunken, his jaw protruded and she saw a broken tooth.
“He looked like maybe he was delayed,” she said of the “very underweight” boy.
Paramedics arrived and so did the boy’s father, who can’t be named due to a publication ban.
The father explained the boy was trouble. He acted out sexually, hid feces around the house and was uncontrollable to the point that they had to home school him, the father told her.
“At this point I had my hand on his shoulder,” Cybulski said. “I couldn’t believe what this man had gone through. … As a parent, I was devastated for him.”
Then the father revealed he had to tie his son up at times to prevent him from digging his nails into cement.
“I’m warning you you’ll probably see bruises on him today,” he told Cybulski, according to her testimony. “I lose it sometimes.”
That didn’t sit right with the cop, so she went to the ambulance to check on the boy and saw the ugly injuries.
On the stand, Cybulski wept.
“A minute earlier I just wanted to give him back to his dad,” she said.
She returned to the father and placed him under arrest. He’d already told her he was a Mountie; he asked her about a police officer he knew.
She told him to pipe down.
“I was quite angry,” she said.
And they drove down to the police station in silence.
The trial continues.