N.S. police board hears that supervisors never ordered search of alleged rape scene – Halifax

A retired senior Halifax police officer testified today that supervisors had the responsibility to order a search of the scene of an alleged rape in 2018.

But that search never happened, despite the location being reported to a patrol officer who spoke to the alleged sexual assault victim in the early days of the probe.

Don Stienburg, the retired staff sergeant who was in charge of special investigations in 2018, is testifying at a police board hearing regarding the complaint of alleged victim Carrie Low.

Low has complained that Const. Bojan Novakovic, the first officer to interview her, and the Halifax police force as a whole, mishandled the investigation of her alleged abduction and sexual assault by at least two men on the night of May 18, 2018.

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Stienburg says that a supervising sergeant with the Halifax police — whose name he doesn’t know — would have had the job of providing “quality assurance” in those first days of the investigation.

The board has heard that police weren’t dispatched to the Halifax-area scene to conduct a search and retrieve Low’s underwear and her shoe, even though Novakovic had noted that Low had told him of the exact location.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published July 18, 2023.