The Bay Bulls Standoff

by Chris Ryan

  Moreover, a fundamental best practice of incident response wasn’t followed, says the report. Ideally, the police emergency response team leader, the head negotiator and incident commanders are in constant communication at a single command post as events unfold, it says.

  “One area of concern identified during the review was that this practice was not regularly adhered to.”

  Instead, incident commanders alternated between the Bay Bulls Town Hall command post and a mobile command post used during tactical operations. At various times during the week, officers used tear gas, pepper spray, noise grenades, a battering ram and ultimately the water hose as they tried to force Crockwell out.

  The review team in particular found that the absence from the central command post of the emergency response team leader—who was often out helping short-staffed officers—“may have inadvertently impacted the outcome of this incident” as communications the night Crockwell fled weren’t given proper weight.

  The Mounties declined to release the full report when its findings were first made public in July 2011, citing security concerns.

  “It’s really quite boring,” Sgt. Boyd Merrill said at the time.

  Merrill highlighted the review team’s praise for how officers handled themselves under intensely stressful conditions. He also focused on how the RCMP emergency response team had just eight members at the time of the standoff when its full strength is twelve, and on the use of two command posts that “negatively impacted this incident.”

  The Crockwell standoff cost more than $444,000, according to documents released under Access to Information.

  Afterword

  Leo Crockwell’s dealings with the court system were somewhat of a rollercoaster ride.

  After Crockwell’s arrest on Saturday, December 11, 2010, he was first brought into provincial court in St. John’s the next day.

  He was initially charged with sixteen counts, including five counts of attempted murder, since he was said to have fired a rifle during the standoff. He was also charged with discharging a firearm, mischief, using a firearm in the commission of an offence, careless use of a firearm, unauthorized possession of a firearm, uttering threats, assault, and assault with a weapon in relation to the standoff. Crockwell also faced charges of uttering threats, assault, and assault with a weapon, relating to the incident that involved his sister hours before the start of the standoff.

  A few days later he was denied bail and remained in custody at Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s. A psychiatric assessment indicated Crockwell was mentally fit to stand trial. Despite the court’s recommendations to get a lawyer, Crockwell repeatedly insisted he would represent himself.

  In a January 6, 2011, court appearance, Crockwell elected to be tried by judge and jury. He again said he didn’t want a lawyer. The trial was eventually scheduled for February 2, 2012.

  On March 2, 2011, Crockwell finally retained a lawyer—Rosellen Sullivan from Bob Simmonds and Partners law firm. Over the course of the next several months, the case was set over to allow lawyers time to review the huge file.

  On May 12, 2011, at provincial court in St. John’s, attempted murder charges were dismissed against Crockwell, leaving eight charges.

  In September 2011, Sullivan filed a pretrial application to request a stay of proceedings. If successful, it would mean proceedings against Crockwell would cease. The application dealt with Charter of Rights violations regarding the police’s handling of the incident. However, weeks later, Sullivan informed the court that, for undisclosed reasons, she had decided she would no longer be representing Crockwell.

  For months after, Crockwell refused to hire a lawyer.

  In December 2011, when Crockwell once again rejected representation by a legal aid lawyer, Justice Richard LeBlanc expressed frustration with the delays and indicated he would, instead, appoint a lawyer, called a friend (amicus curiae) of the court, to assist in making sure Crockwell got a fair trial. The lawyer chosen was Randy Piercey from the law firm Kelly Piercey.

  As the trial was supposed to start on February 2, 2012, and with the jury chosen, Bob Buckingham told the court he had agreed to represent Crockwell. He was Crockwell’s second lawyer. As a result, the jury that had been selected for the trial had to be dismissed and a new one had to be selected. The trial was rescheduled to begin March 26, 2012.

  However, on March 23, 2012, just as the second jury was chosen, Crockwell informed the judge he had dismissed Buckingham as his lawyer and had decided to have Ken Mahoney from the law firm Bristow Moyse represent him. The start of the trial was once again rescheduled—this time to April 17, 2012.

  On April 19, 2012, after a slight delay to deal with jury exemption requests, the trial finally got under way in Newfoundland Supreme Court in St. John’s.

  However, on April 28, 2012, just days into the trial, Crockwell shocked the court when he fired Mahoney in the courtroom during the trial and once again decided to represent himself in the trial. Justice LeBlanc pleaded at length with Crockwell to retain his lawyer, telling him he would need a lawyer as the trial progressed. He said that, from a legal prospective, things would get very daunting and he would not understand most of it. Crockwell thanked him for his advice but rejected it.

  On May 28, 2012, after calling fifty witnesses, including dozens of RCMP officers, the Crown rested its case and Crockwell declined to call any evidence of his own. However, Crockwell did subpoena Provincial Natural Resources Minister Jerome Kennedy. Kennedy was his lawyer in 1998, when Crockwell was found to have been unlawfully detained under the Mental Health Act at the Waterford Hospital for 140 days. Kennedy showed up at the courthouse but left after Crockwell’s plans changed.

  Before both sides presented their closing arguments, the judge dismissed two of the eight charges against Crockwell—assault and possessing a firearm without a licence. The judge found there wasn’t enough evidence presented in the trial to proceed on those charges.

  On May 31, after six weeks of testimony, the four men and seven women of the jury were sequestered for deliberations.

  As the trial went on, Leo Crockwell got more comfortable with how the judicial system operated inside a courtroom. He could easily go on for an hour or two before the judge corrected him or told him to rephrase a question or that he was rambling. A number of lawyers who were spectators during the trial were overheard complimenting Crockwell’s performance.

  On June 1, after two days of deliberations, Crockwell was found guilty of assault with a weapon, mischief, and three weapons-related charges, including unlawfully discharging a firearm. He was found not guilty on an assault charge.

  On June 27, Leo Crockwell was back in court with another new lawyer, legal aid lawyer Lori Marshall, to set a new date to deal with an outstanding application for a stay of proceedings filed by his first lawyer, asserting the RCMP used excessive force and violated his Charter of Rights during the eight-day standoff.

  On October 22, when Leo Crockwell appeared in court, he was represented by another new lawyer, Mike King, whom he had retained the previous month. At his last appearance on June 27 he was represented by lawyer Lori Marshall. She had since been called to the bench of the provincial court. King informed Justice LeBlanc that there was a breakdown in client-solicitor relationship. Crockwell told the judge it was because King did not want to proceed with his stay of proceedings application, which was filed before Crockwell’s trial by his first lawyer, Rosellen Sullivan.

  Former federal prosecutor John Brooks was hired in early November. He parted ways with Leo on December 19. So, with lawyer number six released, Crockwell argued his stay of proceedings application on his own, with assistance from Randy Piercey.

  On February 13, 2013, the judge dealt with the application originally prepared by Rosellen Sullivan. LeBlanc rejected the motion to have the charges stayed. At the sentencing hearing the next day, C
rown prosecutor Elizabeth Ivany said Crockwell should receive a sentence of five years and be given a one-for-one credit for time served. Randy Piercey, who was appointed to serve as a friend of the court in the case, suggested that LeBlanc had several options, including giving Crockwell a day and a half’s credit for each day he had been in custody. Justice LeBlanc gave Crockwell straight time, one for one on time served.

  The next day, February 15, Crockwell was sentenced to four years in prison (1,460 days). Given the amount of time he had already spent in custody (797 days), Crockwell had twenty-one months and twenty-five days left to serve. After his release from the penitentiary, he would be on probation for three years.

  However, on December 19, 2013, Leo Crockwell became a free man after he brought it to the attention of corrections authorities and prison administrators in July that they had miscalculated his sentence. With prisoners normally serving the provincial standard two-thirds of their sentence, Crockwell wasn’t scheduled to be released for another five months, which would have been May 2014. However, that changed when a Newfoundland Supreme Court judge concluded Crockwell should be released earlier. Justice Alphonsus Faour ruled that calculating Crockwell’s release date should have been based on his total four-year sentence because that was the mandatory minimum for the charges, according to the Criminal Code of Canada. The calculations used were based on the time Crockwell had left to serve after credit for pretrial custody—twenty-one months and twenty-five days. However, during a hearing to argue the case, Crockwell’s lawyer, Nick Westera, said the proper way to work out his sentence would be to calculate two-thirds of the total sentence. That would mean he should have been freed from jail on August 10, 2013, four and a half months or 132 days earlier.

  When Leo Crockwell was released from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary at 8:55 p.m., on the night of December 20, he went back to his hometown of Bay Bulls, where he resides to this day.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my fiancée, Tina Wakeham, and our daughters, Stacie and Hollie, for their encouragement and support during the writing of my first book. Tina, there would be no book but for the encouragement of you when I would get frustrated and disheartened. My proofreaders, Tina Wakeham, Karen Crockwell, and Wanda Ronayne, your collective criticism forced me to be a better writer. Thank you. A big thank-you to Rosie Mullaley for assistance with the epilogue. To Garry and Jerry Cranford, and the crew at Flanker Press, for giving an author a break in getting his first book published, thank you. A big thank-you to my editor, Susan Rendell. I learned so much from you and thoroughly enjoyed working with you. You were a pleasure to work with.

  Chris Ryan was born in 1964, the eighth in a family of nine children. He attended elementary school at St. Patrick’s in Bay Bulls and high school at Mobile Central High School in Mobile. His family has been in the funeral home business for close to fifty years.

  Chris has worked in the offshore oil industry for a number of years. He was twice elected to the town council for his hometown of Bay Bulls, first in 1993 and again in 1997. He also sat on the board of directors for the East Coast Trail Association for five years, serving the last year as vice-president. On April 23, 2013, he was awarded the Flamber Head Award for volunteerism, for years of service on the first project management committee of this group and on its board of directors.

  An admitted political junkie, Chris spent a number of years on the Ferryland District Liberal Association and served the last two years as president. Chris is also a former board member of Say No to American Garbage Group (SNAGG), an organization that was opposed to the importation of garbage into Newfoundland and Labrador for final distribution. Today he sits on the Witless Bay and Area Conservation Group as a director. This group’s goal is to protect sea trout and salmon that visit the Lower Pond in Witless Bay, a pond made world-famous for record-sized brown trout.

  Chris is a serious birdwatcher who has seen more than 300 species of birds in his birding career. He is one of fewer than twenty people in Newfoundland and Labrador to have done so. He also grows and trains Japanese bonsai trees. Chris holds a black belt in Shotokan Traditional Karate from the Newfoundland Karate Association and is a lover of antique and muscle cars, which he collects. He enjoys hiking and he is a voracious reader, never without a book in his hand or close by, particularly non-fiction, history, political history, and anything with Newfoundland and Labrador content.

  Chris Ryan lives in Witless Bay with his fiancée, Tina Wakeham, their two daughters, Stacie and Hollie, and their two miniature dachshunds, Bella and Lady. The Bay Bulls Standoff is his first book. Chris can be reached at chrisryan64@hotmail.com.

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