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CHARLOTTETOWN — When the P.E.I. businessman arrived at the group home in Charlottetown to pick up his daughter, two RCMP officers were waiting for him.

He immediately assumed his daughter was dead.

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“In those few seconds, I visualized a pile of bloody rags on the road, which was her body run over by a truck,” he says, his voice shaking.

The officers assured him the young woman was fine.

But his sense of relief fell away when the Mounties handcuffed him, saying she had accused him of sexually assaulting her.

I knew it was false.

“I said, ‘Obviously, there’s a mistake here, there’s a communication problem,”’ he said in a recent interview. “I knew it was false.”

It was Feb. 7, 2015. For the next six months, he and his wife were effectively prohibited from seeing their daughter as they were drawn into a bizarre legal nightmare that pitted them against police, the P.E.I. Health Department and the group home.

The Canadian Press is not identifying the family because of the nature of the allegations and the young woman’s vulnerable state. She has severe autism, is virtually non-verbal and has the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old.