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SPORTS 9
Tracey Matters is the sister of Greg Matters, who was killed in a police shooting on Monday night on Pinko Road. She spoke to the media Thursday afternoon.
‘Why was it necessary?’
r Soldier’s sister wants answers in wake of fatal Pineview police shooting
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Peter JAMES Citizen staff pjames@pgcitizen.ca
Tracey Matters wants to know why police chose to shoot and kill her brother Greg Matters on Monday, even though he wasn’t in possession of a firearm.
“Why was it necessary to use lethal force on a man on his own property who was not holding and did not have a firearm?” Tracey Matters said at a news conference Thursday afternoon in front of the home where Greg, 40, was living on Pinko Road in Pineview. “Why wasn’t my brother allowed to talk to his doctor, his
mother or family friends during the standoff when this was requested?”
Greg, a 15-year veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces, was suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) when he was killed after a 30-hour standoff with the RCMP’s Emergency Response Team (ERT) on the farm adjacent to the home where he was living.
The shooting is currently being probed by the Independent Investigations Office (IIO), a newly created provincial agency that examines police-related deaths.
Tracey also wondered why the RCMP made the decision to deploy the ERT team and why the team didn’t wait longer before deciding to shoot.
— see WATCHDOG, page 3
MATTERS
COURT
Accused invoked God to justify abuse, stepdaughter tells court
Mark NIELSEN Citizen staff mnielsen@pgcitizen.ca
FRENCH ROLE
A&E 29
A man accused of sexually assaulting his two stepdaughters on a near-daily basis for as long as a decade would claim it was God’s will, the court heard Thursday.
“He did constantly tell me that if God didn’t want it to happen that he would’ve told him, he said that a lot to me,” the oldest of the two stepdaughters, now 23 years old, testified when she took the stand at the Prince George courthouse.
Asked to elaborate, she said it was in reference to the sexual abuse, “although he didn’t refer to it as abuse.”
The first encounters began, the court heard, when she was 11 years old, shortly after one of her stepbrothers in an eight-child family made sexual advances towards her then snuck into her bedroom one night and took her pajamas off.
By that time, the stepfather has asserted himself as the head of the household after he and two of his sons moved into the home some months before. Compared to when it was just her mother and five siblings, there were “a lot
He did constantly tell me that if God didn't want it to happen that he would've told him, he said that a lot to me.
— Stepdaughter’s testimony (name withheld)
more rules.”
The mother “completely stepped aside,” the court heard.
“She didn’t discipline us or talk to us about rules or anything to do with life,” said the stepdaughter, whose name cannot be published under a court-ordered publication ban against identifying the victims. “Even when I was becoming a woman, she wasn’t the person that talked to me about that kind of stuff.”
In contrast, the stepfather would “talk to you forever about your choices,” and “yell scripture” at her sister. By then, they had been uninvited from a church they had been attend-
ing but the stepfather said that did not matter because he was a pastor.
“He believed he was very high up in the Christian community,” she told the court.
When one of the family’s boys ran away and was retrieved by the police, he was forced to sleep on a cot in the garage and fed food through a doggy door, she testified.
Punishments included cutting the lawn with scissors.
Contact with family friends and relatives was limited, and the stepfather also pitted her and the sister he allegedly abused against each other by claiming one did not like the other or was taking advantage of the other, she told the court.
It reached the point where the stepfather was her only confidant.
“He told me that I didn’t really need anyone, all I needed was him because he had the answers and he was here for me,” she said.
When the stepbrother, who was a few years older, snuck into her room, she said she pretended to be sleeping until he was finished and then went to her parents’ bedroom to tell them what happened.
— see ‘HE WOULD, page 4
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