After the troops trained to be murderous racists are of no more use to them, the government either casts them aside, pensions them off, or outright kills them, if they aren't dying of some godawful disease they caught from some toxic equipment they've been using already. These guys are sometimes so fucked up from killing civilians, being a hated imperialist racist invader, and generally being treated like shit by their own superiors, that they fucking go crazy. And this is where this leads us. Despite her son being one of the pigs, I feel for her.
Greg Matters’ haunting final message to his mother before RCMP killed him: ‘I’m a little worried about what’s going on’
Brian Hutchinson | 15/10/13 | Last Updated: 15/10/13 8:44 PM ET
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
More from Brian Hutchinson | @hutchwriter
Courtesy Matters FamilyUndated photo of Greg Matters with his mother Lorraine.
PRINCE GEORGE, B.C. — Just before he was shot and killed by police, Greg Matters made some phone calls. One was to his mother, Lorraine, but she couldn’t pick up; the 66-year-old was sitting in an RCMP detention cell, nursing her bruised chest.
Another bruise was forming under her chin, she recalled Tuesday, at a coroner’s inquest examining circumstances around her son’s death. The small, circular mark, she alleged, was the result of an RCMP rifle muzzle having been pushed in her face.
Greg left a message on her answering device. It was played Tuesday at the inquest.
“Hey mom, can you call me? I’m a little worried about what’s going on and where you are. Can you call me? OK.” Then he hung up.
His voice was calm; it was as if his mother was late to return from a grocery shopping trip. But Lorraine was in police custody, and she was hurt. She was also worried as heck.
A storm was brewing at the Matters’ place, a large acreage southeast of Prince George. The previous day, Sept. 9, 2012, Greg and his older brother Trevor had physically clashed just outside the property. Blows were exchanged. An off-duty RCMP officer happened by and broke up the fight. The Matters brothers went their separate ways.
But Greg worried about repercussions, the inquest has heard. He called RCMP in Prince George several times later, asking if Trevor had been arrested. The National Post has obtained recordings of his calls to police; they are plaintive but polite. During one, Greg claimed that Trevor had guns. In another, a police dispatcher admonished him for dialling 9-1-1. He apoligized.
Later the same day, before things got out of hand, Greg left the house he shared with his mother and drove to an old cabin, also on the family’s property. The 40-year-old Canadian Forces veteran had for years suffered from what was eventually diagnosed as post-traumatic stress. The old cabin was his “sanctuary,” the inquest heard.
For reasons the inquest’s seven-person jury must try to determine, the RCMP decided to move onto the property and arrest Mr. Matters. He was known to them, and had been arrested previously for uttering threats.
B.C. Coroners ServiceThe scene at the property where Greg Matters was shot and killed by the RCMP.
Members of the RCMP’s local emergency response team (ERT) were dispatched, along with regular officers. At least some were positioned outside the Matters property the night before the fatal encounter.
A neighbour noticed officers moving about after dark. “Two cops came up,” Valerie Pinko testified Tuesday. “‘We’re looking for Greg Matters,’ one of them said. I said, ‘You’ll find him sleeping in bed.’”
Ms. Pinko told the inquest that she saw “police cars everywhere” that night, idling with no occupants. “I should have taken the keys [from the vehicles] and thrown them away, is what I should have done,” she testified.
She recalled speaking with Mr. Matters early the next day, and informing him that “there’s cops swarming all over the place.” He agreed to accompany her into Prince George. “We were going to go into town and talk to the cops and get this mess sorted out,” Ms. Pinko testified. But when she arrived at the Matters’ gate, police turned her away.
“Were you intent on helping [Mr. Matters] escape?” a lawyer for the RCMP asked Ms. Pinko on Tuesday.
“To where?” she replied. “I don’t know where we would escape to.”
Lorraine Matters had already attempted that morning to get to her son. He was still in the old cabin, making cell phone calls and sending emails, asking people — including at least one local newspaper reporter — for help.
‘I was begging for my son’s life’
His mother called the RCMP in Prince George and spoke to an officer who “made it clear that he just wanted Greg to come [to the detachment] without incident.” She told the officer she was going to go see her son, and he seemed fine with that, she testified.
She was in her car and had turned up the lane towards the old cabin when police stopped her. An officer emerged from a black SUV. Ms. Matters got out of her car and a confrontation ensued, the inquest heard.
The officer, identified at the inquest as RCMP Cpl. Collin Warwick, grabbed the keys from her hand, Ms. Matters testified. Cpl. Warwick “grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, drug me about 50 feet on the ground and kneed me so hard that I thought my bones were broke.” she testified. “I was begging for my son’s life.”
Cpl. Warwick then pointed his M-16 rifle at her face and told her “not to move,” she told the inquest.
“Had you given [police] permission to be on your property?” asked lawyer Cameron Ward, who is representing the Matters family at the inquest.
“Absolutely not,” said Ms. Matters. Police had no warrant, either, the inquest heard.
She was handcuffed and taken to the RCMP detachment in Prince George. Mr. Matters tried calling her, and left his brief voice message. They were the last words she ever heard him speak. She heard them after he’d been shot dead.
According to a report from the Independent Investigations Office of B.C. (IIOBC), the provincial body that examines police incidents involving death or serious harm, Mr. Matters emerged from his cabin after his mother’s arrest, holding a small hatchet. Police fired a Taser at him, and when that didn’t drop him, another officer — Cpl. Warwick, the inquest heard Tuesday — shot him. Ms. Pinko, the neighbour, says she heard the rifle fire. “I said to a cop, ‘Is that what I think I’m hearing?’ He just nodded his head and said ‘Yep.’”
The IIOBC report describes police telling investigators that Mr. Matters was shot twice in the chest. But a forensic pathologist told the inquest last week that two bullets entered Mr. Matters’s back.
The inquest continues through this week.
