The Ontario police watchdog has cleared an OPP officer of wrongdoing after an investigation into a drug overdose following a December 2025 arrest in Pembroke.
Just before 6 p.m. on Dec. 2, officers from the Upper Ottawa Valley OPP detachment responded to a reported disturbance at a home on Pembroke Street West.
A 44-year-old man wanted on an outstanding warrant was arrested
there without incident, the OPP had said in a news release on Dec. 3.
According to police, two loaded weapons and a quantity of suspected cocaine were seized.
While in the back seat of a cruiser, the man went into “medical distress” and was taken to hospital for treatment, the OPP had said in the Dec. 3 release.
According to an April 1 release from the Special Investigations Unit, the man had OD’d while in custody.
SIU director Joseph Martino “found no reasonable grounds to believe an Ontario Provincial Police officer committed a criminal offence in connection with the drug overdose,” Wednesday’s release stated.
The man had been searched and put in the backseat of a police cruiser, and, while there, got a white substance from the crotch area of his pants and ate it, the SIU said. He subsequently went into medical distress and officers provided naloxone while calling paramedics, it said, before he was taken to hospital for treatment of a drug overdose.
“Director Martino found it regrettable that the bag of drugs was not detected and confiscated prior to the man’s ingestion of the drugs in the cruiser,” the release read, “but noted it seemed unlikely that anything short of a strip search would have revealed the item given its location.”
The SIU is a civilian oversight agency that investigates incidents involving police in which there has been death, serious injury, the discharge of a firearm at a person or an allegation of sexual assault.
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