Durham police were warned of ‘catastrophic’ fire risk

For years, Durham Regional Police had known about the risk of “catastrophic losses” in the event of a fire at the Courtice Court storage warehouse. Despite this, the Star has learned, the service made a deliberate decision not to install a sprinkler system — choosing instead to forgo the cost of renovation.

The consequences of that decision, the Star can report, have been sweeping.

On top of more than $20 million in direct losses, the destruction of thousands of pieces of physical evidence continues to touch hundreds of criminal cases — including homicides, firearm and drug possession cases, and minor thefts alike. Without the evidence and with what defence lawyers describe as poor communication from Crown prosecutors, cases have fallen apart, ended in sudden plea deals or resulted in no jail time. Many more are potentially at risk of litigation, lawyers say.

Chris Bovie, spokesperson for Durham police, said the service has reviewed the circumstances of the fire and “is confident it exercised due diligence in maintaining the building and all seized property.”

Up until the fire, the Courtice Court facility had passed annual inspections, Bovie noted, and the service had made “significant investments” to ensure its safety.

Asked about the choice not to install sprinklers, Bovie noted the property lacked municipal water access until 2021 and by that time, the service was planning to end a 28-year lease and move to a new facility. With the cost of installing a sprinkler system estimated at more than $2 million, “a decision was made by (the) command of the day to not make that taxpayer investment into a privately-owned building,” he said.

When asked how many criminal cases have been affected by the fire, Durham police, the regional Crown office, and the Ministry of the Attorney declined to comment.

When lawyer Kim Schofield visited the Courtice Court facility a few months before the fire, she said it was unlike any evidence locker she’d come across in her more than 30 years of criminal defence.

For one, the facility was multi-use. Seized cars were stored in the garage alongside several vehicles from the service’s own fleet, including K9 unit SUVs and the Durham police’s light-armoured vehicle. In the attached storage warehouse were the holding facilities for cash and drugs, with physical evidence — weapons, clothing, personal items — catalogued upstairs.

The ceiling was unfinished. Piles of tires and seats ripped from police cruisers were stacked in corners. Evidence and drugs seized by the service lay in plain sight.

“I remember it being such a state that I was surprised they kept evidence there,” she said. “It seemed very disorganized and strangely eclectic.”

An Office of the Fire Marshal (OFM) report obtained by the Star pins the most likely cause of the fire as a battery in one of two badly damaged vehicles that were towed to Courtice Court from a head-on collision earlier that day. 

Around 3:45 p.m., the last staff member left for the day and noticed nothing unusual as they walked through the garage on their way out, the report states, citing video evidence.

The first sign of trouble came just after about an hour and a half later — a glowing light in the garage captured on security cameras.

Just after 6 p.m., the cameras cut out and a heat detector activated, triggering a call to Clarington Fire Service.

There was little to stop the flames as they spread from the wrecked cars to the other vehicles in the garage and “numerous” seats from DRPS cruisers. As the structure collapsed overtop the fire, a firewall separating the garage and the adjacent warehouse gave way.

It took three days to extinguish the blaze. No one was injured.

When the Office of the Fire Marshal released the findings, it noted that the batteries to both wrecked vehicles’ had not been disconnected after the collision.

In one of the two cars, a Jeep, “the collision scene photos showed the fuse box hanging by the conductors,” the report notes.

Durham police did not respond to questions about its storage protocols.

When the dust settled, Insp. Mitch Martin, assigned to lead DRPS’s response to the fire, recognized he had a substantial loss on his hands. Little in the facility remained recognizable.

The concrete vaults once used to store narcotics and currency seized by the service were relatively OK, but the entirety of the garage, including a bomb disposal van, the armoured vehicle, a mobile command car and two K9 SUVs were “determined to be a total loss,” Martin later wrote in an affidavit.

Meanwhile, it was unsafe to go upstairs to check on the evidence lockers.

(Martin declined to speak to the Star when reached for comment, citing ongoing court proceedings.)

The full extent of the loss wouldn’t be known for weeks, however. The “severely compromised” building would need to be secured before recovery efforts could begin. 

Of particular concern was the firewall dividing the garage and warehouse. The concrete vaults, stored against the wall on the warehouse side, were causing the structure to lean. The wall would need to be emptied and removed, and part of the wall torn down, before recovery efforts could begin.

On July 25, officers salvaged all the drugs and currency from the vaults. The storage warehouse was a different story — what hadn’t been destroyed by fire was waterlogged in the efforts to put out the flames. It had since grown mouldy.

None of the items on the second floor were recoverable, Martin wrote in his affidavit.

Ultimately, the fire caused $22 million in damage, according to the OFM.

Internal DRPS correspondence shows that in 2017, a Durham police facility manager along with three other service members and a retired inspector turned emergency management specialist, were given a brief outlining the possibility of significant “operational, reputational, and financial” losses in the event of a fire at the Courtice Court facility.

If the storage locker were to burn down, the document said, according to a summary presented in court, the loss of “vital records, real evidence, fleet assets and other property items” was anticipated to be “catastrophic.”

“The service needs to ensure that any acceptance of this continued risk exposure is appropriately documented and acknowledged.”

In an emailed response to the warning, the Durham police facility manager questioned that assessment. The fire mitigation controls at Courtice Court were “not ideal” but “acceptable” he wrote.

“The report indicated our reputational damage would be catastrophic. Would that be the case?” he continued. “Fire is a pretty good reason for the loss of property and evidence.”

“The existence of digital reports, photos, et cetera, would remain available,” making it unclear how many cases “might actually be lost in court due to the lack of physical evidence.”

The facility had passed its most recent inspection and had an approved fire plan, alarm system, and extinguishers in place, he wrote, acknowledging the lack of sprinklers but explaining the service planned to rely on the fire department’s ability to set up a portable water system if a blaze were to break out.

For defence lawyer Nathan Gorham, the key piece of evidence was a bloodied Abercrombie and Fitch sweater.

In the fall of 2022, he and his partner, Breana Vandebeek, had just weeks left to prepare for their client’s first-degree murder trial. Even though it had been months since the fire, they did not yet know if the sweater had been destroyed.

“It got to the point where all of our preparation time had been eaten up,” Gorham said. 

The case against their client was strong — he’d admitted to fatally stabbing his roommate in December 2017. The question was whether or not he had intended to do so, an argument that hinged on the pattern of the blood on the sweater.

“If we had the sweater and the jury could see the blood splatter, it stood to change the narrative,” Vandebeek explained. Having access to physical evidence can exculpate a client because the jury or judge is able to see “the real thing” in person, she continued.

“Everyone knows pictures and videos can get distorted. It’s just not the same.”

Weeks after the fire, the Crown notified the region’s defence lawyers to hang tight for clarity on the impact, but it was only in October that the Crown confirmed to Gorham and Vandebeek that just a few pieces of evidence, kept in freezers somewhere on the property, had been salvaged; at that point, they assumed the sweater had been destroyed.

Ultimately, the long-delayed trial went ahead in spring 2023, with no access to the sweater. Their client was acquitted of first-degree murder but found guilty of manslaughter.

At sentencing, the lawyers prepared to argue the case should be stayed. In an application, they alleged that Durham police ignored the risks at the facility for years; among other things, they cited the lack of sprinklers at the facility and the emails showing police had dismissed warnings.

“We had cogent evidence that there was a deliberate decision to ignore risk,” Gorham told court. 

In the end, the issue was never litigated. The Crown offered a deal: time served.

It was much the same for other lawyers across the region.

In a possession case, Schofield planned to argue that the evidence against her client had been compromised during the police investigation. “The packaging of (the evidence) was to shed light on that,” she said — but the fire made the argument impossible.

She planned to apply to have her client’s charges dropped. Instead, the Crown offered a non-custodial sentence.

Lawyer Reid Rusonik didn’t hear from the Crown’s office about evidence in his case until the day after his client had already taken a plea and been sentenced. When the lawyer threatened to take the case to the Court of Appeal, prosecutors stayed the proceedings altogether.

In theory, the case was strong, Rusonik told the Star. “But it was sort of just agreed upon that everybody (would) hold their noses.”

Gorham estimates the fire at Courtice Court affects more than 500 criminal cases; for him, the heart of the issue is how many people took a resolution — pleading guilty or standing trial — without the ability to form a full defence.

“Every defendant deserves to make informed decisions,” he said. “There’s a high chance that there’s a case where someone pleaded guilty without the full facts of their case.”

He continued: “Let’s just say lawyers on half of those cases applied to have their client’s charges dropped.” The result, he said, would be “a landslide of litigation.”