Jaw admits shooting RCMP constable

GREG YOUNGER-LEWIS

Salomonie Jaw, testifying in his own defence during his trial this week for the murder of RCMP Const. Jurgen Seewald, gave a stumbling, contradictory account of his actions while handling the shotgun that killed the policeman.

Jaw, 49, said he showed the gun to Barbara Ettinger, his common-law wife, after she had called police on the night of March 5, 2001, to remove Jaw from the house because he was threatening violence and refusing to leave.

Jaw, speaking in Inuktitut, admitted in court in Cape Dorset that he would have had to release a safety switch and pump the action of the gun in order to shoot the officer. He recalled that while he was showing the shotgun to Ettinger before the police came, a shell fell out of the chamber. He picked up the shell and put it into the magazine, but he said he did not load a new round into the chamber.

When Jaw began his testimony, he closed his eyes, clenched his hands between his legs and spoke of sitting and crying on a boulder across the bay from where the officer was shot.

“I started regretting what I had done,” Jaw said. “And I was very sorry for what I had done at that point.”

But while Jaw could share details about his remorse, he drew a blank on how he came to shoot Seewald, a 47-year-old veteran officer who had served much of his career in Antogonish, Nova Scotia. Seewald had transferred to Cape Dorset a short time before the shooting.

Asked by his lawyer, Sue Cooper, on Feb. 10 whether he knew how the gun ended up in his hands, Jaw looked to the 12-person jury, and said in Inuktitut, Agga. No.

During cross-examination, Crown attorney Judy Hartling asked Jaw why he didn’t help the officer lying on the ground. She wondered why he didn’t call the neighbours for help, or check the officer’s wound.

Jaw replied that he was too distracted by thoughts of suicide.

“When I heard the screaming, then I knew I had shot him,” he said. “All I could think about at that moment was to commit suicide.”

Sitting in a vinyl chair beside the judge’s table, Jaw spoke softly about how events unfolded when Ettinger called the police for help.

Jaw explained that he had shown her the gun because he thought by showing her “our problem would be done with” and said he didn’t plan on shooting anyone with the gun.

Alternating his gaze from the jury to the floor to the grey kamiks on his feet, Jaw pointed out several times during his testimony that he didn’t say or do anything to provoke the officer. He said he wasn’t worried about a confrontation with police, and said he thought the matter would be resolved after Ettinger spoke with the visiting officer.

After the call to police, Jaw said the officer arrived minutes later and forced his way through the entranceway to their bungalow apartment building. He ordered Jaw to sit, and then pushed him into a chair when he refused. Jaw’s shirt ripped, and by the time Ettinger came back from getting a new shirt in the bedroom, she found the officer was dousing Jaw with pepper spray.

Jaw told the court the spray made it difficult to breathe, and hurt his eyes so much that he couldn’t open them. By the time he was able to open them again, he said, the officer was lying on the floor, and the smoking gun was in his hands.

He couldn’t remember how it happened, he told the court. But he became suicidal when he realized what he had done.

“That was all I could think after having done that,” he said. “That’s why I told her [Ettinger] I didn’t want to live anymore.”

During her conversation with a 911 dispatcher, Ettinger said that Jaw was promising a fight with police if they came.

In court, Ettinger said that after she hung up the phone, she saw Jaw checking to see if his gun was loaded while waiting for police to arrive.

According to Ettinger, after the pepper spraying, the two men had been wrestling toward the front entrance, past the coat closet where Jaw stores his guns. Ettinger said the next thing she could remember was the two were grappling for control of the shotgun. Jaw had the stock, and the officer had the barrel, and the gun went off.

But a firearms expert ruled out that scenario. Al Voth, of an RCMP detachment in Regina, tested the weapon, Seewald’s shredded storm jacket and gun pellets retrieved from the officer’s body, and found that it was impossible for Seewald to have been holding the barrel when the shot was fired.

Crown and defence lawyers told the judge they will be submitting no further evidence. Justice John Vertes requested the jury return on Feb. 16 to hear closing submissions from both sides, and said they would begin their deliberations the following day.