No charges laid in police shooting of Greg Ritchie at Elmvale Acres

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit (SIU) says there are no reasonable grounds to lay criminal charges against any of the officers involved in the shooting death of a man at the Elmvale Acres Shopping Centre.

Gregory Ritchie, 30, was shot at several times by two Ottawa Police Service officers on the morning of January 31, 2019. A post-mortem later showed Ritchie's cause of death as gunshot wounds to the chest.

A report by the SIU shows police had responded to the shopping centre on St. Laurent Boulevard around 8 a.m., after a complaint of a man carrying a knife in his coat.

The report says the first officer on the scene tried to have a conversation with the man, who was the subject of the complaint. The man grew frustrated and began to threaten the officer with an object he held in his hand and waved in the officer’s direction. 

The object consisted of a rock with a thin edge affixed by fabric to one end of a 40 cm long stick. 

The report says a second officer approached the scene and the man appraoched the officer with the object still in hand, so the officer fired his taser. The taser immobilized the man, but only for a moment, so the officer used the taser a second time.

The SIU's document shows the man again turned his attention toward the first officer and raised the object he was carrying above his head and swung it. That's when the first officer fired two, possibly three, rounds at the man. The second officer fired seven, possibly eight, times.

Three bullets struck the man, who fell on the sidewalk in the area of the entrance doors of the RBC Bank. 

The officers put the man in handcuffs and, with the assistance of a couple of special constables in the area, administered emergency first-aid while they waited for an ambulance. 

Upon the arrival of paramedics, Ritchie was transported to hospital where he was pronounced dead.