BURSTA senior Langley RCMP officer has been convicted for the second time of assaulting a suspect, kicking him in the head while he was lying on the floor of a cell, according to just-released ruling from the B.C. Supreme Court.
Justice Terence Schultes handed down his verdict on Nov. 26 last year, but it was published on the B.C. Supreme Court’s website on April 23.
This is the second time Staff Sgt. Damian Volk has been convicted of assaulting a suspect while they were being booked into the Langley RCMP detachment.
This case began with the arrest of a man named Jason Petrus, who had called 911 and insulted the dispatcher in the early morning hours of July 1, 2020.
A junior officer, Const. Dee, was sent to respond, and found Petrus outside of his apartment, having an argument with his girlfriend, and fairly intoxicated.
No one had been assaulted, but Dee arrested Petrus for public intoxication and prepared to take him back to the detachment, to place him in cells until he sobered up.
On the way there, Petrus banged his head on the transparent barrier between the passenger and driver’s sections of the RCMP cruiser, and accused Dee of hitting him. Dee contacted the detachment to report that incident.
However, when Dee arrived at the detachment, he wasn’t too concerned about getting Petrus through booking. Dee was larger than Petrus, who was about 5’7 or 5’8” tall and weighed around 150 pounds. While Petrus had complained about being arrested, he wasn’t being violent, Dee testified.
Dee was met by Volk and another sergeant when he arrived to book Petrus in, which the constable testified was unusual for a booking that had involved neither threats nor violence.
Normally, a prisoner coming into the detachment is brought into a room, told to stand on a pair of footprints, and then searched before being placed in a cell.
Instead, Volk took Petrus by the arm and marched him straight through to a cell. Dee testified that prisoners are only searched in cells when they are considered to be too violent or threatening to search in the normal way.
Schultes described what happened to Petrus in the cell as a “thorough thrashing.”
Petrus began screaming as he was fast-walked to the cell, “effectively thrown into it” by Volk, taken quickly to the ground, and though he seems to comply as officers rolled him back and forth, Volk pulled his arms up so his Petrus’s hands were behind his own neck.
Dee testified that Petrus’s shoulder was pulled so far back, while he was still handcuffed, that Dee was not sure how Petrus’s arm didn’t come out of its socket.
They maneuvered Petrus’s head around by pulling on his hair.
The officers stripped Petrus to his underwear, and also removed the mattress from the cell’s bed. Strip-searching a prisoner in this way was against RCMP policy.
According to Dee’s testimony, before Volk left the cell, he leaned down close to Petrus’s face and said words to the effect of “You’re going to f——-g talk to my dispatchers like that?”
On his way out, Volk kicked out with one foot, and his heel hit Petrus in the head while he lay on the cell floor. Petrus lay there for another 10 to 12 minutes before he got up and leaned against the wall.
The defence argued that Volk’s foot slipped on the cell floor.
Schultes said the video showed clearly that he “deliberately struck Mr. Petrus in the head with the hell of his boot.”
The video shows a “distinct quick backwards striking movement with his foot.”
Schultes found Volk guilty of assault both for the kick and the force applied during the search in the cell.
The amount of force used was “not objectively reasonable in light of the circumstances that faced Staff Sgt. Volk, which were a complete lack of resistance to being flung around and subjected to various pain techniques, on a fairly indiscriminate basis.”
Last October, Volk was found guilty of assault in an unrelated but similar incident.
Dalibor Kuzmanovic was arrested on Aug. 17, 2020 for suspicion of theft. When he was being booked into the detachment, Volk suddenly took Kuzmanovic to the ground.
In the previous case, Justice John Gibb-Carsley made a similar finding to Schultes’s, noting that Volk’s belief that a suspect presented a threat was not “objectively reasonable.”