2011-04-14
Ryan Rainville admits to smashing police cars at the G20, but says he never intended to hurt anyone.
By Ava Baccari
On trial for his actions during the G20 summit last June, Ryan Rainville told an Old City Hall courtroom Tuesday that he hadn’t originally intended to inflict damage on property during the fateful march Saturday, June 26.
Rainville, who has roots in the Saskatchewan’s Sakimay Nation but lives in Waterloo, was one of the eight people included on the infamous most wanted list Toronto Police released following the G20 and is facing charges of obstructing a peace officer and assault.
A self-described anarchist, Rainville was one of only six people who were spent three months at Maplehurst Correctional Complex in Milton following his arrest in August and is alleged to be part of the group of protestors who dressed in black clothing and employed Black Bloc tactics during the riots that erupted at the summit, smashing windows and attacking police cruisers.
Dressed in a collared shirt and sporting a grown-out Mohawk hairstyle, Rainville testified that on the Saturday in question he saw a man lunge on the windshield of a police car parked near Queen and Spadina. Rainville approached the vehicle, he said, and made two strikes against the passenger’s side of the windshield with a flagpole he had been handed when he joined the march at Dundas and University.
Speaking to a courtroom packed with supporters who made several outbursts throughout the proceedings, Rainville said that when he noticed the bright yellow jacket of the officer inside the car he pulled away from the vehicle and slipped back into the sea of protestors continuing east towards Bay Street. He claimed that if he had known there was someone inside the car he wouldn’t have attacked it, explaining that he ensured two cruisers he attacked later in the day were empty.
As Rainville moved with the crowd heading south on Bay, he said he picked up a hammer that was lodged in a broken window at the BMO Bank of Montreal on King and plunged it into the emergency lights and rear window of police vehicle parked at the intersection. He then says he smashed the windshield of an unmarked police car nearby.
As his mother watched intently from the front row of the courtroom, occasionally locking eyes with her son in the witness stand, the soft-spoken Rainville told the court that he’s not opposed to acts of vandalism as a form of protest “as long as no harm is done to human or animal life.”
Crown Attorney Elizabeth Nadeau passed photos around the courtroom of a man dressed in grey track pants, with a black bag slung over his back and a red flag draping his shoulders, hovering near a police vehicle. The same man is pictured smashing the rear window of another cruiser parked near King and Bay streets.
Det. William McGarry, part of the G20 Investigative Unit, identified the man as Rainville, using separate photos of him taken at events during the week leading up the G20.
McGarry played video footage showing attacks made on three separate police vehicles with the man identified as Rainville engaging in destruction at each scene. In most of the photos, the man conceals his face with a black T-shirt.
Staff Sgt. Graham Queen, the officer in the first vehicle Rainville allegedly attacked at Queen and Spadina, testified that he was trailing the largely peaceful throng of 10, 000 protestors when he noticed the flow of the crowd heading west along Queen Street sharply turning back. When he jumped into his squad car to pull back and create more space for the fast-approaching protestors, he said three men dressed in black, their faces covered, swarmed the parked vehicle.
One pounced on the windshield, Queen testified, causing it to partially collapse, as the officer slunk low in his seat. Shards of shattered glass rained down as two men, one of them allegedly Rainville, smashed the side windows with wooden poles. Queen says he was struck on the head as another man hollowed out the driver’s side window.
A member of the Toronto police force for 23 years, Queen said the experience was the “most frightened I’ve ever been as a police officer. There was nowhere for me to go. I felt trapped.”
He put out a distress call and within minutes, officers on foot patrol rushed to the vehicle, and one reached in to pull Queen out of the smashed car. He recalled the crowd quickly drawing near and chanting “Who’s streets? Our streets!” while hurling rocks, apples, and what he believed to be urine at the baton-wielding officers.
The trial resumes May 31.