The former investigator on the 2007 Surrey Six case testified his salary was $80,000 a year. That year he made $200,000 with overtime.
A former investigator on the 2007 Surrey Six murders testified Monday about the overwhelming pressure he felt working on the case in the months before he had an affair with a potential witness.
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Derek Brassington said that he was so overworked at the time that his mental health was “horrific” and that he once broke down and sobbed in his supervisor’s office.
“One of the jokes was you’ll sleep when you are dead,” he told B.C. Supreme Court Justice Martha Devlin at a special evidentiary hearing. “There was no rest. There was no days off.”
He said his regular pay as an RCMP corporal in 2007 was about $80,000 a year. With all the overtime, he made close to $200,000.
Red Scorpion gangsters Cody Haevischer and Matthew Johnston were convicted in 2014 of first-degree murder in the Oct. 19, 2007, killings of young drug traffickers Corey Lal, his brother Michael, associates Eddie Narong and Ryan Bartolomeo, and bystanders Ed Schellenberg and Christopher Mohan.
Brassington pleaded guilty in 2019 to breach of trust and obstruction of justice because of the inappropriate sexual relationship he had with the woman, who can only be identified as Jane Doe 1. Two other ex-Mounties, Dave Attew and Danny Michaud, pleaded guilty to failing to maintain law and order under the RCMP Act.
The killers won a Supreme Court of Canada challenge to have the police misconduct reviewed to see whether it warranted staying the charges against them. Johnston died of cancer in jail in December 2022 before Canada’s highest court ruled.
Haevischer sat in the prisoner’s box Monday and scribbled notes as Brassington testified. The former officer got emotional several times as he testified and appeared to wipe away tears.
He said he was already working on another high-profile case — the RCMP taser death of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport on Oct. 14, 2007 — when he and others on the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team were also assigned to the Surrey Six case.
They regularly worked 24-hour shifts and would be “ridiculed, mocked” if they complained about the workload or needing a day off, he testified.
Haevischer’s lawyer, Simon Buck, asked Brassington if the Surrey Six investigation differed from other murder cases he had worked on.
“Yes,” he replied, primarily because “two innocent bystanders were killed (and) the savageness of it.”
One of his Surrey Six roles was to cosy up to other gangsters and the women connected to the killers to try to get them to “roll” on the Red Scorpion suspects.
He had extensive dealings with Person X and Y, two Scorpions who eventually agreed to co-operate with police, which led to the charges finally being approved in April 2009. Both their names are protected by court publication bans.
“Running with these guys was just too, too much,” he said.
On top of talking to his superiors about the stress, Brassington also told a psychiatrist that he was struggling. The response was: “It’s almost over. Just hang in there.”
“And this is before everything went sideways for me with the witness that I ended up having an affair with,” he told Devlin.
Brassington said there was as small group of core investigators — all men — who continued to try to get more witnesses from the inner circle to co-operate, including Jane Doe 1.
“Looking back, I should have said, pound sand, you have 25,000 members in the RCMP, 10,000 of which are women. Why don’t you get a woman in here?” he testified.
“Why on earth am I the guy being sent in? Why is it such a tight little cluster of four or five of us that are doing these emotionally high-risk jobs where it’s all about bonding with people, and being vulnerable to them, so that they’ll be vulnerable back to you?”
Brassington, now 54, said he should have “had the wherewithal to say wait a minute. … I’m not giving my cellphone number to this girl just because we want her as a witness.”
Then in his mid-thirties, his ego also got in the way.
“I’d be a liar to say I didn’t have an ego that was … playing a role in this back then too, where you like the fact that you’re you have an important thing to do,” he testified. “That ego can certainly get in the way of your common sense or perspective, or being able to look at yourself from 500 feet up, to take in the big picture, see what it’s doing to your family, see what’s doing to your wife.”
Brassington is expected to be in the witness box for several more days.