 Former RCMP officer Kevin Gregson, shown in this file photo, is being held in the stabbing death of an Ottawa police constable this morning outside the Ottawa Hospital Civic Campus. (QMI Agency file photo)
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Nearly 10 years ago on a Saskatchewan First Nations reserve, a young RCMP constable walked toward a distraught man brandishing a rifle outside his home.
The man wanted the officer, Const. Kevin Gregson, to end his misery.
“I want you to kill me, I want to die,” the man told the then 33-year-old Mountie.
The rookie cop spent the next 45 minutes talking down the suicidal man, actions that later earned him a bravery commendation from the province.
On Tuesday morning, with bitter winds howling across the entrance of Ottawa Hospital’s Civic campus, a man walked up to the window of an Ottawa police cruiser and stabbed a rookie officer in the neck as he wrote up some notes.
Today, Const. Eric Czapnik is dead, and Const. Kevin Gregson, the decorated police hero, is behind bars facing charges in his slaying.
Ottawa’s first killing of a police officer in 26 years has shocked the city and left Czapnik’s colleagues reeling.
“It’s like a family, a brotherhood and to know that it’s one of our own who perpetrated this makes it tough,” said a police colleague of Czapnik, who didn’t want to be identified.
In a brief interview Tuesday morning, Gregson’s mother said that when she spoke to her son after his arrest, she heard “not good things.”
When contacted in Edmonton, Gregson’s brother Hlynn Gregson didn’t know about his brother’s arrest.
“This is a shock and I don’t want to say any more until I know what’s going on,” he said.
In 2006, Gregson found himself on the other side of the law when he was charged after pulling a knife on a Mormon church official in Regina.
Court heard in 2007 that Gregson sat down with Robert Howie, a bishop in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to talk about his temple privileges, which had previously been revoked.
An angry and upset Gregson pulled out a knife and placed it on the desk, with the blade pointing to Howie.
“You don’t know how many ways I’ve been taught to kill,” Gregson said.
Court heard how Howie talked the distraught Gregson down, with the Mountie telling him “I’m messed up. No one knows how messed up I am.”
On April 3, 2007, Gregson pleaded guilty to uttering a death threat and a provincial court judge handed him a conditional discharge and placed him on probation for 18 months.
Following the incident, Gregson was diagnosed with cysts in his brain and underwent surgery.
At the time of his sentencing, Gregson was on paid leave from the RCMP.
Gregson graduated from the RCMP training facility in Regina in 1998 and spent the first few years of his police career at the detachment of Pelly, Sask., a village of about 300 people.
The officer’s encounter with the armed and suicidal man on Feb. 12, 2000, took place on the nearby Keeseekoose First Nation.
Gregson and his partner were responding to reports of shots fired in a home.
Gregson told the Sault Star that “we were trained technically to draw our weapons but I didn’t feel I should because he was so volatile.”
Gregson told his partner to stay back while he went forward to confront the armed man, who told him he wanted the officer to kill him.
“I told him, no, that’s not going to happen,” Gregson told the Star, eventually convincing the man to go back into the house and hand over his rifle.
Gregson, who grew up in Ottawa, said he considered himself an “urban native.”
He was originally a nursing student in Sault Ste. Marie and an orderly at a local mental health hospital. He switched to the native addictions program to prepare for a career in law enforcement.
donna.casey@sunmedia.ca
— with files from Scott Taylor
