Nearly seven years after a young mother was murdered in Surrey, a pair of Vancouver police officers face an investigation into allegations they failed to warn Tasha Rossette her life may have been in danger.
According to the B.C. Supreme Court ruling this week, on Nov. 17, 2005, Const. Craig Bentley was told by a confidential source that Rossette’s boyfriend planned to murder her. Bentley passed the information to his Integrated Gang Task Force supervisor, Staff Sgt. John Grywinski, but the pair decided not to share the information with Rossette immediately, but instead investigate the matter further.
Five days later, Bentley went to Rossette’s Newton-area home and found it surrounded by police tape. She had been murdered.
The murder tip given to Const. Bentley and allegations against him and Grywinski only came to light this week after a judge dismissed their attempt to quash a review of their conduct by the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner (OPPC).
In her Aug. 7 ruling, Justice Laura Gerow said the investigation should proceed and reprimanded the police officers for taking so long to file their petition.
It was November 2007 when the Vancouver Police Department (VPD) began investigating a concern raised by Crown counsel regarding evidence given by Bentley during a preliminary inquiry.
Less than a year later, Rossette’s mother Simone also complained that the two officers failed in their duty by not telling Tasha she was at risk of being killed. In 2009, Simone’s complaint was dismissed by the VPD.
The OPPC requested more information about the matter’s dismissal and ordered the police to revisit the allegations. A year-and-a-half later, the OPPC couldn’t determine whether the allegations had ever even been investigated and in May 2009, again ordered the VPD to investigate.
After requesting several extensions, a November 2010 deadline to review the internal investigation was not met and the OPPC ordered an external investigation.
In their petition to quash the investigation, Bentley and Grywinski said that because they were cleared of wrongdoing in the initial internal investigation, the OPPC had no right to order another probe into their conduct as there was no new information.
Justice Gerow didn’t buy their argument.
“The face of the 2009 order makes it clear that the Commissioner is ordering an investigation because all the information was not considered,” she wrote in her reasons for judgment. “The fact that the petitioners did not commence a petition until after the 2010 order for an external investigation was made, and allowed the investigation to proceed for 19 months before commencing a petition, is indicative of the fact that they were well aware of the reason for the 2009 order and were content with it.”
Rossette, a 21-year-old single mother of a three-year-old girl, was stabbed 40 times and her throat was slit. She was 17 weeks pregnant with her second child.
Her boyfriend, Amjad Khan, and alleged accomplice Naim Mohammed Saghir were arrested and charged a year after her death. In 2008, the two were found guilty of first-degree murder, but those convictions were overturned on appeal last September and a new trial is scheduled to begin early next year.
