Like many relatives of people killed by police, Jones’ family became overnight private investigators. Emily and Jessie had rushed in with cameras as soon as the crime tape came down, taking photographs of every corner of the front hallway and living room. They’d held onto a broken TV that had been struck by a bullet, on the chance it would be relevant evidence. And they paid for an independent forensic study of the house — with measurements calculated by a laser — so lawyers could create a model of the hallway and living room in case Jones’ death went to court. After the shooting, the family found an imprint of a knife roughly five feet up the living room wall, near Jones’ gecko tank. How or when the indentation was made the night of the shooting has remained a mystery. Leblanc ripped out that section of the wall, a strange stucco fossil she now keeps in a cardboard box labelled “Evan.”

Caroline Leblanc, Evan Jones’ mother, continued to live in the home where her son was killed. She said she could neither move nor move on. Peter Power for The Toronto Star

Leblanc continued to live in the same corner row house. She refused to scrub off the black footprint from Hill’s boot on the front door, though the housing co-op finally replaced the bloodstained carpet. She couldn’t move, or move on. “I felt he was here,” she said of her youngest.

A spokesperson for Brantford police said the service cannot answer questions about Hill’s treatment due to the ongoing lawsuit. In their response filed in court, Brantford police issued a blanket denial of all the allegations.

Three months after the inquest, Stuart prepared a multimillion-dollar lawsuit on behalf of the Jones family. It alleged Hill had “significant undisclosed psychological trauma” but returned to active duty without a full psychiatric assessment or treatment. “As a result, no proper determination was made,” Stuart wrote, “ . . . as to whether the trauma of this earlier incident impacted his ability to exercise the judgment required in his future duties as a police officer.”

Having no information about whether Hill received long-term mental health treatment to put him back on duty after shooting Osidacz, Stuart tried to raise the topic during Jones’ inquest. But the subject was deemed outside the scope of the hearing. “I would say there was a conscious effort,” Stuart said, “to not allow that into the inquest.”

After realizing Jones wasn’t the first person Hill had killed, Stuart attempted to learn what treatment and support he’d received from the Brantford Police Service after the 2006 incident, and whether the officer had been ready to go back to work, armed. The lawyer wondered if the sight of the knives in Jones’ hands could have brought Hill back to Osidacz’s shooting, and caused the officer to misperceive the threat and fire at Jones. “Whether it was a flashback, whether it was some kind of moment of crisis himself, I think that could be a factor in what was happening,” Stuart said.

In the cases where an officer pulls the trigger, the psychological impact sets in within hours. A cop who has used lethal force will need help processing the shooting; in some cases, he will have to overcome the stigma of being perceived as weak to get it. Symptoms will manifest in a variety of ways, including shaking, severe insomnia, intense anxiety, and difficulty calming down. The officer can feel fear, anger, sadness and grief. He may become hypervigilant and see everything and everyone as a threat. There may be flashbacks — an inescapable replay of the shooting like a movie clip, again and again. Police forces now know to provide support to officers immediately after a traumatic shift. But experts in first responder mental health say some falter when it comes to longer-term support, leaving cops feeling isolated and abandoned.

In Canada, it’s rare for a police officer to fire their gun — many cops make it through their entire career without ever drawing their weapon, never mind shooting it. Nationally, no government agency keeps statistics on deaths involving the country’s approximately 69,000 police officers. Provincially, the SIU has probed 145 fatal shootings since its creation in 1990, or roughly five a year.

Just eight months into being a police officer, Hill had been part of a March 2006 hunt for Andrew Osidacz, a man who’d slit the throat of his 8-year-old son in one of Brantford’s worst murders. His cruiser’s sirens wailing, Hill rushed to the residence of Osidacz’s estranged wife, the boy’s mother. He heard screaming from the house and pounded on the door — “Police, open the door now,” Hill shouted — then rushed inside. Hill had taken the stand at the coroner’s inquest into Osidacz’s death, and said he found blood pooled on the stairs and smeared on the walls. Hearing a woman’s yells for help coming down the hall, Hill drew his firearm. He recalled that he and his partner Const. Jordan Schmutz sped in to the bathroom to find Osidacz gripping his former wife, one arm wound around her, another holding a bloody butcher knife to her throat. Shaking, covered in blood and sweat, Osidacz said: “I’m going to kill her.”

Jones’ mother and sisters went home and Googled the officer. When old news articles came back, they were stunned to learn Jones wasn’t the first person Hill had fatally shot on the job.

But even though Hill never took the stand, the inquest did give the family one major new piece of information: Hill’s name. In the nearly two years before the inquest, they hadn’t known who shot Jones, due to a SIU policy to not identify officers cleared of criminal wrongdoing.

Stanborough sided with Hill’s lawyer, ruling that it would be inappropriate to compel the officer to testify given his medical condition. He also ruled Jones’ family could not see the medical report explaining why Hill was unable to attend the inquest. (Cheryl Mahyr, spokesperson for the Ontario coroner’s office, said it’s not unusual for a witness to be excused from testifying on medical grounds).

Among Stuart’s concerns was that, without Hill on the stand, the officer’s notes would be called upon — and their reliability was a “serious issue” given that they were completed “as per lawyer,” a notation written next to Hill’s initials. That would indicate they were prepared with the help of a lawyer, a practice since outlawed by the Supreme Court of Canada. Lawyers for Brantford police, however, argued that it was not a certainty that the lawyer helped Hill with his notes.

But in January 2012, three weeks before Jones’s inquest was set to begin, the lawyer for coroner Dr. Jack Stanborough announced Hill would not testify. The coroner had received a doctor’s report stating the officer could not take the stand for medical reasons. Stuart sent off a lengthy plea to the coroner stressing the importance of Hill’s in-person testimony. “The officer’s evidence lies at the centre of many, if not all, of the issues that the inquest is to address,” he wrote in a notice of motion requesting a pre-inquest hearing on Hill’s attendance.

Stuart was compiling a list of questions. There wouldn’t be a trial, but the lawyer would be able to question Hill at the coroner’s inquest into Jones’ death. Held after most police-involved deaths, these hearings have the look and feel of a court proceeding — there’s evidence, a jury and witnesses who swear they’ll tell the whole truth. The purpose is not to assign blame, but to examine, in depth, the circumstances of a death and produce recommendations to prevent similar fatalities. In the vast majority of fatal police interactions no criminal charge is laid, meaning there’s no trial examining the circumstances. An inquest is the place these deaths get publicly examined, in detail. Families learn how their loved one died, and hear from those involved. Officers connected to the death take the stand. These are typically the most difficult and emotional days of testimony for everyone involved.

The dispatcher hadn’t told the officers speeding to the scene that Jones had mental health or addiction issues, something Stuart said Brantford police knew from Jones’ previous contacts with officers and should have documented in his file. Instead, the dispatcher broadcast over the radio that the teen had been flagged as violent. Nonetheless, Hill realized on his own that Jones was likely suffering from a mental illness, according to his police notes. “I believed based on my experience that this male was suffering from a m/h disorder,” he wrote in an all-caps scrawl. “… He did not appear of sound mind.”

Stuart had concerns, too, about the officers’ conduct. Despite having been recently certified in mental health policing, Hill, alongside the other officers, repeatedly shouted commands at Jones. Whenever possible, officers are taught to avoid doing this because it can ratchet up tension. Instead, they should switch tactics if issuing the so-called police challenge — “drop the knife” — is not working. Ideally, they should attempt to offer help or ask questions, a proven de-escalation tactic. Hill told the SIU he’d done so, but the station’s dispatch recordings — captured only when officers use their radios to loop each other in on developments in real time — picked up no such offers of help. Neither did audio recordings capture any swearing, but Leblanc and two neighbours who witnessed the encounters insist Hill was cursing at Jones.

After Evan Jones’ death, his family became overnight private investigators. They kept items, such as this computer panel, that were damaged by a bullet the night Jones was killed. They also found an imprint of a knife roughly five feet up the living room wall. How or when the indentation was made the night of the shooting has remained a mystery. Peter Power for The Toronto Star and Coroners’ inquest photo

She was home in January 2015 when she received an unexpected phone call. It didn’t last long. She could muster little more than a two-word response: “Thank God.”

Four years after the SIU cleared Hill in Jones’ killing, the watchdog was reopening the case. The SIU has rarely taken the extreme step in its 27-year history. The explanation was clipped. The decision was the result of “materially new information coming to light.”

No one in Jones’ family had any sense of what that could be, and neither did Stuart. Though welcome, it was a puzzling development. Six days later, as Leblanc and Jones’ siblings were still absorbing the news, the SIU reopened a second Brantford death investigation.

On a January morning in 2009, Brantford police had been following a stolen vehicle to the banks of the Grand River, near the local casino. The suspect was a 32-year-old named Benjamin Wood. He’d abandoned the car — left it running, cocaine inside — and made a run for it. Two Brantford police officers in pursuit spotted footprints in the snow down to the edge of the frozen river, where they saw Wood lower himself over a railing and onto an embankment abutting the water. A third officer went down to the river’s edge and caught up to him. Wood refused to believe the officer was legitimate, saying: “You’re not a cop.” After Wood became aggressive, the two men grappled with one another, then Wood slipped out of his own sweater to worm out of the cop’s grasp. Free, he ventured onto the thin ice, falling through. Hours later, a diving team found Wood’s body.

The SIU had cleared the officer in that death, too. The public never learned the officer’s identity because, oddly, no inquest took place. Ontario requires that such inquiries be held after most police-involved fatalities. But in this case, the coroner determined an inquest wasn’t mandatory because Wood was not technically in police custody at the time he died.

Now the SIU was reopening the investigation for the same reason given in the Jones case: “Materially new information.”

Weeks, then months, went by with no news. But Jones’ family began hearing stories. A friend reported he’d overheard men he assumed were cops chatting in line at a local business, saying the same officer was involved in both deaths.

Hope buoyed the Jones family at first. “Finally, things are happening,” Jessie had written on her brother’s Facebook page a few months after the investigation was reopened. Jones’ still-active account, used periodically by friends and family yearning for connection with him, offers a timeline of Jones’ family’s transition to frustration. “We should be hearing back from the SIU soon . . . after a whole year!” Jessie wrote in early 2016. “One way or another we will find out what really happened.” In July 2016, another update: “This year and a half wait better be worth it.”

Meanwhile, the lawsuit against Brantford police was stalled while the criminal investigation continued. It was all the family could talk about. What was taking so long? Why didn’t they have any idea of what was happening? Each time Leblanc asked, she was told there was no new information to release. The issues, an SIU spokesperson said after the family complained, “are exceptionally complicated.”

When Hill walked into Brantford police headquarters in December 2014, he said he had “murdered” Jones and Wood, according to a detailed account of Hill’s utterances released by the SIU late last year. That news release was the first public confirmation that Hill had indeed been the officer who followed Wood down to the river’s edge, physically struggling with him immediately before Wood ran out onto the ice and drowned. The officer was now claiming he’d lied or omitted vital information during the original SIU investigations into both Wood’s and Jones’ death, telling two officers he’d recounted an untrue version to investigators at the prompting of the Brantford Police Association. He’d said he now feared God more than the SIU, according to the watchdog’s release. He’d claimed he was criminally responsible in their deaths.

Adam Hill was put into a situation that “no police officer would ever want to be in,” a police union spokesperson said. “Having to shoot an 18-year-old boy left him heartbroken.” Facebook

“Given the enormity of these claims,” said Tony Loparco, the director of the SIU and a former Toronto Crown attorney, “the SIU immediately commenced an investigation.”

In varying statements to colleagues, Hill claimed that before Wood broke through the ice on Grand River, he’d struck him on the head, telling one officer he’d hit him a number of times in a “heavy handed” way. This, he said, was why Wood made the fatal decision not to return to the safety of the shoreline but instead ventured out onto the ice.

Meanwhile, Hill offered conflicting accounts about Jones’ death. To one officer, he’d stated he shot an unarmed man. To another, Hill said he was unsure whether Jones was armed at the time of the shooting, but afterward was relieved to see a meat cleaver near the teen’s body. To another, he’d claimed Jones was not coming toward him at the time of the shooting, but said a representative from the police union had counselled him to lie to SIU investigators and falsely claim the teen was advancing when he fired his gun.

When the SIU contacted Hill after reopening the Jones and Wood cases, the officer did not agree to be interviewed, as is his right. There would be no more talking.

Hill is believed to be the only police officer in the SIU’s nearly 30-year history to be investigated as the main player in three separate fatalities. In the last 15 years, only three people have died during an interaction with Brantford police. Hill was the officer in every case.

Early on a Friday in December 2016, a driver picked up Leblanc, Emily and Jessie in Brantford. Two years less a week since Hill’s police station utterances, the SIU had finished its re-investigation. The unit had sent a car to bring Jones’ family to its nondescript headquarters in Mississauga to tell them the results, alongside Stuart. Nervous anticipation muted the ride. Leblanc and Jessie were convinced that Hill would be criminally charged; investigators had gone to all this effort, after all, so he had to be, they thought. Staring out the window at passing suburbs and farmland, Emily wasn’t so sure.

Evan Jones’ sister Jessie and his mother, Caroline Leblanc, outside the home where he was killed. The family was stunned when the SIU concluded — for the second time — that the shooting was legally justified. Peter Power for The Toronto Star

The investigation had hinged on Hill’s mental health. To determine whether to lay a criminal charge, such as assault or manslaughter, Loparco and his team had to ascertain whether the confessions were the result of a psychiatric crisis. The SIU had to turn to tactics rarely used in other cases. Three times, it obtained medical documents through a production order. It also consulted with a leading forensic psychiatrist.

Hill, the SIU later stated in its release, was “in the midst of a mental health crisis” when he made his statements. But after reviewing the medical files, the psychiatrist concluded that, despite Hill experiencing delusions, his utterances appeared to have been unaffected, the family was told. Namely, the content of the statements themselves seemed to have come from an operating mind.

But the psychiatrist’s opinion had only been preliminary. For a deeper understanding of Hill’s state of mind, the SIU had sought to obtain additional medical documentation to cast greater light on Hill’s mental health history. However, Jones’ family was told the records had a high privacy interest, and Crown prosecutors had advised the SIU they would not be obtainable. As a result, Loparco made the decision to evaluate Hill’s utterances on their own, without the broader context.

Tony Loparco, the director of the SIU and a former Toronto Crown attorney, said the “enormity” of Adam Hill’s statements prompted an immediate re-opening of the investigations into Evan Jones’ and Benjamin Wood’s deaths.

That presented another problem. When Hill began spouting his utterances at the police station, none of the officers sought out audio or video equipment, meaning there was no recording of his words. Of the seven officers who’d heard Hill’s incriminating statements, only four took notes, and none had attempted to record what he said word for word. The SIU would have to rely on interviews with the seven officers to obtain Hill’s words, the most important evidence in the case.

But the SIU’s reinvestigation was already handicapped by a late start. Eight days ticked by before Brantford Police Chief Geoff Nelson reported Hill’s comments to the SIU, despite the law requiring the agency be informed immediately when it has a clear reason to investigate. By the time the officers were interviewed by the SIU about Hill’s statements three and four months later, their memory had degraded.

Nonetheless, investigators were able to confidently determine no charge should be laid in Wood’s drowning death. Hill had claimed he’d struck Wood in a “heavy handed way” shortly before the drowning death. But the SIU found Hill’s claim was “flatly contradicted” — twice. Two eye witnesses interviewed during the original SIU investigation said Hill did not strike Wood before he ran out onto the ice. More important still, a post-mortem examination found no skull fracture, bleeding or even bruising to Wood’s head.

Jones’ death, however, was different. Hill’s comments about the shooting could not be disproven by forensic evidence. But as they assessed the case, investigators determined that Hill’s statements about Jones wouldn’t pass muster in court. In order for the SIU to consider laying a criminal charge, the evidence supporting it must meet a high legal bar. If a charge is based on a statement to police, it must be accurate, reliable and complete to be admissible in court.

But Hill’s comments, as summarized by the officers, were “rife with inconsistencies” and unreliable. Hill had changed his story even while speaking to the same officer, telling one that Jones was unarmed when he shot him, then stating that he’d lied about the manner in which the teen had been holding the knife when he fired.

The officers’ failure to properly record Hill’s statements, however, was “fatal” to the issue of accuracy. It meant the SIU had far from a complete account of Hill’s words. If the officers had made audio or video recordings, Loparco told the family, then it could have warranted the scrutiny of a jury. Because Hill’s statements were not complete, accurate or reliable, the SIU could not even attempt to admit them into evidence. The shooting of Evan Jones remained legally justified. The watchdog closed the case again.

Leblanc, Jessie and Emily were stunned. Soon after the meeting’s end, they were chauffeured back to Brantford, the hour-long drive silenced this time by disbelief. To Stuart, it had sounded as though there may have been evidence to lay a charge “if the Brantford Police Service had done their job,” he said in an interview after the SIU meeting.

“It’s really quite amazing that someone could walk in to a police station and confess,” he said, “and no one makes any record of that.”

Emily lives with her daughter Alexis, now 9, in the same housing co-op where she grew up, a few doors down from where her brother died. In her living room, vivid original paintings hang alongside more than a dozen photographs of Jones, many with Alexis, then a chubby toddler with bouncing brown hair. For about a year after Jones died, Alexis looked around the house for “Evy,” but gradually the image of her playful uncle went out of focus. She hasn’t been told what happened. “I don’t know how you tell a child that,” Emily said.

Caroline Leblanc, top, gazes at photos of her son and granddaughter, Alexis. For about a year after her uncle’s death, the toddler, lower left with Jones, looked around for “Evy.” Peter Power for The Toronto Star

It’s been a year this week since the SIU closed the case for the second time, but the sting is still fresh. “You would think, ‘OK, he confessed, they’re going to charge him,’” Emily said. “If it had been a civilian . . . ” Jessie jumped in to finish her sister’s sentence: “they would have been questioned, sat in a room, recorded.”

The family believes their ongoing lawsuit against Hill and Brantford police is the sole remaining route to justice. Since the SIU closed the case again, Stuart has made new allegations against the force, including that Chief Nelson broke the law by waiting eight days to report Hill’s incriminating statements to the SIU. The new claim also accuses officers of intentionally failing to capture Hill’s statements, motivated by a desire to protect their former colleague.

Mark Baxter, president of the Brantford police union, has a different explanation for his colleagues’ behaviour: compassion. Three of the cops who visited Hill in the hospital were off-duty, seeing a colleague, and could not have been expected to take notes or record. Shortly after the SIU closed the re-investigation, Baxter accused Loparco of “Monday morning quarterbacking” for criticizing officers for failing to record Hill’s comments, calling it an “extraordinary after-the-fact assumption.” Besides, Baxter said, “virtually everything (Hill) said that night was wrong.” He abjectly denied Hill’s claims that a police union representative had told him to lie to the SIU. The Brantford Police Association “has never and would never counsel any member to break the law.”

Two months after the SIU closed the Wood and Jones investigations for a second time, the five-member Brantford police board met behind closed doors to review the officers’ conduct. They concluded the officers had rightly recognized Hill as a “member in distress” and exercised reasonable discretion by refusing to believe his comments were automatically criminal. “Officers are not required to use audio or video recording equipment when interacting with someone in the condition of (Hill), who was clearly in a state of mental health emergency,” the board later said in a June 2017 report. The board recommended that an amendment be made to Brantford police policy to direct on-duty officers to take notes and obtain advice from an inspector if they are confronted with a member making inculpatory statements.

The Brantford Police Service, too, said their members properly responded in a caring and professional way to what was a mental health crisis — Hill was “not under arrest, not under investigation,” said Acting Inspector Scott Williams in an email, responding on behalf of the service. The priority in all mental health situations, no matter who is involved, is to ensure the person in crisis is provided proper health care, as was done in this case, Williams said.

“(Officers) demonstrated incredible professional integrity in reporting comments that were made during the crisis, and this same integrity was demonstrated by those who visited with their colleague in the days following,” he said. Williams did not respond directly to a question about what caused Nelson’s delay in notifying the SIU.

Brantford police also conducted a review of use of force that led to Wood’s and Jones’ deaths, concluding that Hill followed his training and behaved appropriately. Before Hill shot Jones, he had “continuously” attempted to de-escalate through communication. He then attempted less-lethal force by using pepper spray. “It has been determined that all officers conducted themselves properly,” the Brantford police board said in a report.

Hill remains a member of the Brantford Police Service, but has been absent from work since Jones’ 2010 shooting for medical reasons. In between 2012 and 2014, Hill had an ongoing complaint at Ontario’s Human Rights Tribunal against the Brantford police and the City of Brantford, alleging employment discrimination due to disability. The complaint was later withdrawn and the details are not public.

Six months after he was cleared by the SIU for the second time, Hill wrote an entry on his Facebook page accusing the Brantford police of discrimination, claiming they have been “abusing” members with PTSD for years and considered the condition “bullshit.” Brantford Police Service deny the allegations contained in Hill’s post, saying the service works with health care providers “to support its members who are dealing with medical disabilities including PTSD.” The Brantford police board, too, stated it is satisfied with the available support given to officers.

In his post, Hill intimated that more work needs to be done. He called for mental health challenges to be taken as seriously as physical disabilities, claiming to have been “harassed, abused, bullied, and threatened.” Hill said he’d been screaming out for support for years.

“My cries for help were not answered.”

This story was developed at the Banff Centre’s literary journalism residency.