Staff Sgt. Shawn Harrison and Sgt. Shawn Whipple of the Thunder Bay Police Service (TBPS) has been charged with one count of dereliction of duty and one count of misconduct under the Ontario Police Services Act in connection with the investigation into the death of Stacy DeBungee. In a ruling Tuesday by Greg Walton, an officer who presided over the misconduct hearing, which began in May and lasted three weeks, Harrison was found guilty of both charges while Whipple was found not guilty. Harrison was a detective at the time of the investigation, but has since been promoted to sergeant. At the start of the hearing, he pleaded guilty to the charge of dereliction of duty. “My family and I are pleased that there is finally some accountability for the way the Stacey investigation was handled,” his brother, Brad DeBundji, said in a statement released by attorneys representing him and Rainy River First Nations, the community of the family. “We had to fight the Thunder Bay Police Service every step of the way to ensure accountability for Stacy. He deserved a proper death investigation. We deserved to know what happened to our brother.” The body of Stacy DeBungee, 41, an Ojibway man from the Rainy River First Nations, was found in the McIntyre River in Thunder Bay on October 19, 2015. (CBC) The body of 41-year-old DeBungee was found in the McIntyre River on the morning of October 19, 2015. Within three hours of the discovery of DeBungee’s body, police had issued a press release saying the initial investigation did not indicate the case was a suspicious death, even though the body had not yet been positively identified and an autopsy had not yet been performed. A second news release was released the next day, which ruled the death “non-criminal”. The family hired a private investigator, who determined that DeBungee’s debit card was used after his death and interviewed witnesses who were not involved in the police investigation. The officers refused to meet with the investigator. A complaint was made to the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD), which reviewed the initial Thunder Bay police investigation and released a report in 2018 outlining its shortcomings.
“Beyond alarming”
During the hearing, former Deputy Police Chief Andy Hay testified that investigators should have treated the case as a possible homicide early in the investigation. In his ruling, Walton wrote that he could not understand how or why Harrison was as quick to conclude as he was that alcohol contributed to the death, other than relying on a conscious or unconscious bias connected to DeBungee’s aboriginal status that he should he was drunk on the waterway. Walton, a retired Ontario Provincial Police chief, also expressed concern that this conclusion was not based on evidence and that Harrison did not take further investigative steps to determine how DeBungee ended up in the river. “This is beyond disturbing; it is incomprehensible that an experienced investigator was content to simply assume that a sudden death was accidental when there was absolutely no evidence to show how [Stacy] DeBungee actually came into the river,” the ruling states. Walton also said that if Harrison had treated the case as an unknown or undetermined manner of death, the investigation would have been more intense. “Instead, the inquest was conducted into his sudden death [Stacy] DeBungee fell well short of the minimum expected by any research standard.” The hearing officer concluded that there was insufficient evidence to find Whipple guilty of disparaging conduct because of his limited role in the investigation. A third Thunder Bay police officer had been charged with dereliction of duty, but that case was dropped after the officer retired in April.
The decision comes almost 7 years after the death
A TBPS spokesman issued a media release Tuesday night that included a link to the decision and said a disposition hearing is scheduled for September, but no further comment would be made. The hearings took place in May and June, nearly seven years after DeBungee’s death, and came after years of legal wrangling. Under the Police Services Act, a notice of hearing must be submitted within six months of the initial complaint, but in this case, this did not happen until more than two years later, after the OIPRD report was completed in 2018. For the proceedings to proceed, the Thunder Bay Police Services Board had to apply for an extension hearing. The case was mired in a years-long legal battle, involving the CBC, over whether that hearing would be open to the public. The case eventually reached the Ontario Court of Appeal, which led to a judge ruling that the hearing was not closed to the public. The extension hearing was finally held in February 2021 and it was decided that the three officers would face disciplinary hearings.
