More than three and a half years after six people were killed in one of the most mortal incidents in the workplace in the history of Ottawa, an explosion of 2022 in a manufacturing installation of Tank trucks in Ottawa, the Ottawa police have presented criminal charges against the owner of the company, Neil Greene.
The 54 -year -old faces six charges of criminal negligence that cause the death of Eastway Tank, Pump and Meder Rick Bastien employees, Danny Beale, Kayla Ferguson, Matt Kearney, Etienne Mabiala and Russell McLellan, as well as a position of criminal negligence that causes bodily damage to the traffic of employees.
Of the deceased victims, all but Kearney were killed in the explosion in the family business of Merivale Road in southern Ottawa on January 13, 2022. Kearney died of their wounds in the hospital the next day.
Greene was arrested and accused on Thursday morning, then released with a promise to appear before the court.
The researchers first confiscated evidence during a search warrant in the Greene offices two years ago. The charges occur after police errors, defense maneuvers and later legal battles arrested the investigation for many months, and almost completely derail it.
CBC News made these battles public last year after fighting successfully in the Court to inform about the content of the affidavits presented by the Police in 2023, also known as information to obtain, or IADS, that the investigators wrote to convince the judges to order multiple search warrants in the case.
‘Public pressure is not a substitute for evidence’
In a statement sent by email on Thursday, Greene Kirstin Macrae and Mark Etel’s lawyers wrote that the “events of January 13, 2022 were a horrible tragedy for all interested parties”, and pointed out that three and a half years have passed since then.
“There was no evidence of criminal negligence at that time. None in the next year of an exhaustive ministerial investigation with experts, including the Ontario Fire Department. None throughout the year, the matter was before the courts and was resolved as a regulatory violation, not a criminal offense. None for more than a year after the case was resolved,” says the statement.
“Our position is that there was never and now there is no evidence to justify accusations of criminal negligence. Public pressure is not a substitute for evidence.”
A great fire on January 13, 2022 left the site of a business in Merivale Road, Eastway Tank Pump and Enter Ltd., very damaged. The explosion killed six people.
Provincial crimes managed last year
In January 2023, the Ministry of Labor accused Greene and the company of three identical provincial crimes under the Occupational Health and Safety Law (OHSA) in relation to the explosion.
In April 2024, Greene and the company declared themselves guilty of not making sure that the diesel fuel used for wet test trucks was not contaminated with gasoline or any other flammable liquid or substance. (Wet tests involve loading an oil tanker with diesel or gasoline to calibrate the equipment).
The company also declared guilty of not providing adequate information, instruction and supervision to workers on safe fuel storage and handling procedures to protect employees from the danger of contaminated diesel fuel.
An Ontario court judge ordered Greene and Eastway to pay a total of $ 850,000 in fines and fees. The corporate fine was the highest issued against an Eastway size company in the history of the OHSA, and the fine against Greene was one of the highest for an accused individual under the law.
Police investigation did not start for a year
The Criminal Investigation of the Ottawa Police did not begin until almost a year after the explosion. The incendiary unit had initially determined the explosion and the fire had not been deliberate. The ministry then took the lead, says a police affidavit.
Things changed in December 2022, when the ministry shared its conclusions and said it would be exaggerating charges. A personnel sergeant of the incendiary unit sent an email to an inspector to say that a criminal investigation can be justified, and shortly after, it began.
From January to July 2023, the Police conducted about 30 interviews with the current and previous employees of Eastway, and prepared documents for production orders and search warrants, the case administrator DET.-SGT. Michael Cathcart wrote in an affidavit.
CBC News reports on these search warrants during the past year revealed that researchers believe that a chain of negligent acts caused the fatal explosion. They included inappropriate cleaning, lack of written procedures, diluting fuel and not being land and joining the truck.
Criminal accusations have not been tested in court, and Greene is still innocent of them.
On July 26, 2023, the Police executed their first search warrants in an offices space in Kanata North that Greene had been using after the explosion, among other places.
It was then that legal battles began.
Privilege, letter rights, contracts
On the one hand, the police admitted that more than two dozen boxes of gasoline paper records and climate problems illegally, out of the reach of the original search order confiscated. (“Documents” had been omitted by mistake of the list of elements to search, police said).
For another, Greene’s defense team claimed that the seized material contained information subject to the lawyer-client privilege, a cornerstone government that maintains private communication between a person and their lawyers.
To deal with the privilege problem, a contract was finally carried out ordering that the independent lawyer examined everything and eliminates privileged communications.
A separated search warrant in September 2023 allowed researchers to re -married everything they took from Greene that summer, and expand the range of dates of their search in more than five years: from June 2015 to March 2022.
Since then, CBC learned that the date range was extended to see how Eastway operated before, during and after the mandate of an employee who had improved security in the company, and then was fired.
The defense also claimed that the Police had no reason to believe that a crime could have occurred when they presented production orders and search orders, and requested a statement that Greene’s Charter rights were violated. (The lawyers abandoned a bet to obtain all the data and documents seized by the police who returned to Greene, and to prevent the police from using anything that confiscated).
In March, a judge of the Superior Court refused to declare that Greene’s rights had been violated, citing insufficient evidence.
The first appearance in the court of Greene is scheduled for October.
