Rare hearings wrap on alleged mishandling of suicide by military police

OTTAWA — Public hearings into the tragic 2024 death of a Canadian defence analyst concluded on Friday.

The public interest hearings, which began on April 20, are the first in more than a decade and were launched in response to allegations military police mishandled a welfare check on the day Master Cpl. Shaun Orton took his own life at his Ottawa home.

They were called by Canada’s military police watchdog due to the seriousness of the allegations and questions about whether the military police system failed to help Orton.

His wife, Sarah Orton, accuses military police of unreasonably delaying a welfare check for some six hours after she first called to raise concerns about her husband’s well-being. She also alleges they violated protocol at the scene by failing to attempt resuscitation.

“It hurts immensely knowing that on Shaun’s last day, I tried everything to help him, and institutions could have done more,” she told the hearing on April 22.

“This changed my life, and it impacted not only me but my family and military family. I have friends across Canada who still serve and there is a fear that their mental health call may not be taken seriously.”

Military police said during the hearings that Sarah Orton’s initial call did not lay out the full seriousness of the situation, that they were understaffed at the time and that Orton appeared to be dead when they arrived.

When Sarah Orton first called military police around 9 a.m. on April 21, 2024, she said her husband had messaged her throughout the night that he was “spiralling out of control and needing help.” She was out of town at the time and requested a mental health check on him, according to call transcripts.

She also told police that he had stopped responding for two hours and would not answer his phone.

Orton had deployed to Afghanistan as infantry and had attempted suicide in 2019. The couple went through a trial separation just a few weeks before his death.

Sgt. Mathew Young, who handled her calls and was one of two officers to arrive on the scene, told her on the first call that unless Orton had explicitly indicated he had a plan to kill himself, “our hands are kind of tied,” since military police “don’t typically respond” in those instances. He gave her a phone number for his unit.

She told the hearing she felt she was “being dismissed that morning and that I was not being taken seriously.” She said that after her call to the unit number went to voice mail, she called Ottawa police, who then raised the matter with the military police again.

Sarah then called military police again at 2:46 p.m. and convinced them to do a wellness check, which happened around 3:30 p.m.

Orton was about a month away from being medically released from the military, she said in one of the calls.

Sarah alleged before the panel that military police froze when they found her husband and were unsure of what to do. She said she learned of his death — which she described as a “dagger to my heart” — from the hospital and not the military.

Orton had hanged himself and his body was still warm when discovered. His wife’s counsel said military police made no attempt to resuscitate him and CPR was not performed until civilian emergency services arrived on scene, even though policy states the officers must try to save a person’s life unless death is “clearly evident.”

Counsel for Young said the Ottawa detachment is chronically understaffed and was under instruction to respond only if a military member explicitly indicated they intended to end their own life. Counsel also said the wellness check policy was outdated and unclear.

Young testified he did not feel the situation was urgent during the initial call, did not know about Orton’s past suicide attempt and did not believe there was anything he could do once he and the other officer arrived on the scene.

“There was nothing there that immediately prompted me to think that, especially with my previous experience with him, that he was going to be a harm to himself,” Young testified on April 23.

“We don’t have a crystal ball. We never know when people are going to do something like that.”

Young also said there was “nothing significant” in his training covering welfare checks, and training on sudden deaths was not “very in-depth.”

He said that when he and the other officer arrived at the property around 3:30 p.m., they examined the outside of the property before entering and finding Orton’s body. He said that his face, hands and feet looked purple and his body was still warm but without a pulse.

“If I had any belief that Shaun was alive when I found him, of course I would have cut him down and I would have started CPR,” Young said on April 24.

Ottawa police arrived at the scene some 10 minutes later and Orton was declared dead at hospital a few hours later.

Orton’s death became a point of discussion about updating military police welfare-check policy, Canadian Forces Provost Marshal Brig.-Gen. Vanessa Hanrahan told the panel on Tuesday.

Hanrahan said that while she can’t be certain of how training was carried out in each detachment in Canada, she believes military police in general have enough guidance to decide about how to react to calls.

“Nothing has been brought to my attention to lead me to believe that they don’t have sufficient information to be able to make an appropriate decision about how to respond to a call,” Hanrahan said on May 12.

The Orton hearings ended on Friday with a policy roundtable on welfare check instructions. The final report by the Military Police Complaints Commission will be made public.

Public interest hearings are meant to establish whether military police acted appropriately under the circumstances, and to produce policy recommendations.

The last public interest hearing took place in 2015 — a probe into the 2008 suicide of Cpl. Stuart Langridge, whose parents were denied access to a copy of the investigation report.

The next such probe, which is expected as soon as this fall, will look into a botched active shooter drill on a base in Montreal.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 15, 2026.

The Canadian Press