Article content continued

The Canadian Press

Efforts to find him with a tracking dog were unsuccessful, but hours later police received calls from residents about a suspicious man in the area of Range Road and Mann Avenue. A police release said the man was observed trying to swim across the Rideau River.

“Officers attended and two of them went into the water after the man who was showing signs of distress,” the release said. “As the officers got closer to the suspect, he went under the water and has yet to be located.

Pedestrian walkways and bike paths in the area remained closed as part of the search.

“There was a lot of wide eyes in the neighbourhood because there was a big police presence,” Randy Boswell, a professor at the Carleton School of Journalism, said on Thursday.

“I talked to some of the cops who said they were looking for what they described as a ‘chubby black man’ who was moving in and about the backyards of houses the block of houses between Range Road and Blackburn Avenue. So you had police’s canine unit roaming around in peoples’ backyards looking for some kind of fugitive. People were not clear on what exactly the situation was, so it’s kind of a fragmented story,” Boswell explained.

Boswell added that while people were fairly concerned that something like that could happen in such a “quiet neighbourhood”, he also thinks people didn’t feel like they were in any immediate danger.

Photo by Jean Levac / Ottawa Citizen

Sultan, a member of a well-known family in London’s Sudanese community, is the subject of a Canada-wide warrant in the June 14 slaying of Cook. The teenager, formerly of Brampton, Ont., had traced his missing phone to an address in the London area and became involved in a confrontation with three men in a vehicle before he was fatally shot.