Two RCMP officers charged with obstruction of justice are now awaiting a judge’s verdict.
Const. Arthur Dalman and Staff Sgt. Bayani (Jon) Eusebio Cruz are accused of ordering a bystander to delete his cellphone video at a crime scene where a man later died in police custody, in Prince George in 2017.
Dale Culver was a Wet’suwet’en and Gitxsan man and the father of three children, the youngest an infant when he died almost seven years ago.
Culver was taken into custody after police were called about a man allegedly casing vehicles, according to the Independent Investigations Office of B.C., the province’s police watchdog.
A report said Culver was pepper-sprayed during a struggle, had trouble breathing and died.
Five officers were criminally charged in the case in 2023, including two Mounties charged with manslaughter, but all the charges have been stayed except for the obstruction charges against Cruz and Dalman.
As closing arguments in the trial began Monday, about 50 supporters of Culver’s family formed a circle around his daughter in the courthouse and sang a traditional Indigenous women’s warrior song.
Several uniformed RCMP officers, including Mounties in tactical vests, sat in the courtroom in support of the officers on trial.
Prince George RCMP detachment Supt. Sean Wright said he was in court to support his colleagues and watch the “outcome of the proceedings.”
Dressed in suits, Cruz and Dalman sat in the front row of the gallery, directly across the aisle from Culver’s daughter, who took extensive notes during the court proceedings.
In closing submissions by Crown and defence lawyers, the court heard that Culver had been in an altercation with a police officer who tried to arrest him.
Multiple officers who rushed to the scene took Culver into custody and put him in a cruiser.
The defence contends that senior officers then told them to talk to bystanders and gather videos and surveillance footage that could be used as evidence to charge Culver with assaulting a police officer.
But the Crown’s main witness testified that Dalman and Cruz ordered him to delete the video he took.
Kenneth Moe testified that he started filming from a nearby parking lot but was warned by people driving by that he should put his phone away.
He testified they told him the police were telling people to delete videos and he would get into trouble for filming.
Moe testified that Dalman and later Cruz approached him and that the officers told him to delete his video or he would be arrested and his phone seized.
The lawyers for Cruz and Dalman refuted the claims, saying Moe misunderstood what police told him.
Defence lawyers said Cruz and Dalman only asked to see Moe’s video to determine if it was of evidentiary value but decided it wasn’t because it was blurry and showed only police lights.
The court heard that Moe had arrived on the scene after Culver was arrested and before the man went into medical distress and hadn’t witnessed anything of significance.
“He missed the window. He didn’t see the action. This wasn’t a Pulitzer Award-winning documentary,” Cruz’s lawyer, Brian Gilson, told the court.
The officers had testified that as they walked away, Moe apparently decided to delete the video of his own volition.
Dalman’s lawyer, Danielle Ching McNamee, said the defendants were “not engaged in some conspiracy over a video of no evidentiary value.”
Judge Adrian Brooks challenged the defence argument, saying it would be “surprising” for Moe to voluntarily delete his video. “It goes against common sense. It makes no sense to me.”
Ching McNamee suggested Moe may have deleted the video because he’d been “spooked” by the officers, needed to keep his phone and was afraid of going to jail.
The defence said Moe wasn’t a credible witness because he’d been drinking that night, suffered from hearing loss and had a previous criminal record.
The court heard that a second Crown witness testified that she had arrived on the scene earlier as officers were struggling with Culver,
Kelsey Michaloski said she witnessed numerous officers holding someone down for 10 minutes with significant force.
She said an officer, who didn’t match the description of Cruz or Dalman, got up from the “dogpile” of Mounties holding Culver down and told bystanders who were filming that police were going to confiscate phones and take people to jail.
The court heard that Michaloski testified she saw officers pick Culver up from the ground, like a “dead weight” and put him in an ambulance.
Gilson called her testimony “flat wrong,” as Culver was put into a police cruiser after his arrest, not an ambulance.
Ching McNamee said it was improbable that there was a “mass conspiracy” of RCMP officers who had suddenly “gone rogue.”
Crown prosecutor Cory Lo argued that Michaloski’s testimony corroborated Moe’s and that there was a police effort to suppress evidence.
Judge Brooks noted that a portion of Dalman’s police notes about the night in question were directly copied, word for word, from Cruz’s notes, despite the fact Dalman testified on the stand he had not looked at Cruz’s report.
A date for the judge to deliver his verdict will be set in July.
Dalman’s lawyer told the court her client had served as a master Corporal in the Canadian Armed Forces and had six months experience as an RCMP recruit the night that Culver died. He is now a member of the RCMP’s elite Emergency Response Team.
Cruz’s lawyer said the officer is a Filipino immigrant with 23 years of RCMP experience who had been promoted to staff sergeant, one of the RCMP’s highest ranks.