Grieving mother says she was harassed by supporters of Ottawa police Det. Helen Grus
An Ottawa mother said she experienced waves of grief after learning her deceased daughter’s confidential case files had been improperly accessed, then suffered harassment after she was thrust into the midst of a conspiracy theory by supporters of Ottawa police Det. Helen Grus.
She received harassing phone calls at her home after one of those supporters learned her identity and published her name and photo online, along with memorial photos of her baby girl lifted from her social media account.
The woman, who asked to remain anonymous to avoid further harassment, wrote a lengthy statement describing her downward spiral after she received a phone call from Ottawa police in late March 2022 — in the midst of celebrating the first birthday with friends and family after her infant daughter passed away.
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“Those who have lost someone important know how hard it is to enjoy celebrations without that missing piece,” the woman wrote.
When Ottawa police told the mother that someone had accessed her daughter’s case file, the phone call “immediately sent me into a spiral of grief and PTSD,” she wrote.
Her grief was compounded over the next four years by the long-running and high-profile tribunal.
“As many of us know, grief comes in waves,” she wrote. “Sometimes these waves are triggered by an event: a smell, a small reminder of some kind. Sometimes these waves come on for no reason. It sucks the air out of your body, and all you can do is brace for the impact and ride the wave.”
The sequence of events that followed “contributed to these waves,” she wrote, and “made them hit more often.”
Prosecutors attempted to file the letter as a victim impact statement during Grus’s disciplinary proceedings, but the letter’s admissibility was contested by Grus’ defence lawyer, Bath-Shéba van den Berg.
5News aggregated this summary from the outlet’s public feed. The full article, with all the context, is on ottawacitizen.com — the content belongs to Ottawa Citizen.
