Three Canadian law enforcement officers have been charged with manslaughter in the 2020 shooting death of an 18-month old baby, officials announced Wednesday.

Toddler Jameson Shaprio was shot and killed in November 2020 when constables with the Ontario Provincial Police attempted to stop a truck driven by the boy’s father in the City of Kawartha Lakes, according to the The Peterborough Examiner.

Police said the man had abducted his son from a home in Trent Lakes, about 25 miles away.

The 33-year-old father crashed the truck into a police cruiser at a roadblock, seriously injuring OPP officer Chris Dobbs who was laying down spike strips in the road.

A fight broke out after the crash and three officers opened fire on the vehicle, fatally striking young Jameson and his father.

Joseph Martino, director of the Ontario Provincial Police’s Special Investigations Unit, told the Examiner that there are, “reasonable grounds to believe that three Ontario Provincial Police officers committed criminal offenses” in relation to the death of the child.

OPP Constables Nathan Vanderheyden, Kenneth Pengelly and Grason Cappus were each charged with manslaughter and criminal negligence causing death.

They are scheduled to appear in court in Lindsay on October 6, the newspaper reported.

“When a tragedy such as this occurs, it affects the families, the community and our whole service. It is devastating when an innocent life is lost during an incident,” OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique said in a statement.

A GoFundMe page has been set up to assist Jameson’s mother, Tara Shapiro, who has been left two raise her two other autistic children as a single mother.

WASHINGTON — Reports of sexual assaults across the US military jumped by 13% last year, driven by significant increases in the Army and the Navy as bases began to move out of pandemic restrictions and public venues reopened, The Associated Press has learned.

Mirroring the increase in those reports is the disclosure that close to 36,000 service members said in a confidential survey that they had experienced unwanted sexual contact — a dramatic increase over the roughly 20,000 who said that in a similar 2018 survey, US defense and military officials said.

The latest numbers are certain to anger lawmakers on Capitol Hill who have been critical of the Pentagon’s efforts to get a handle on sexual crimes and misconduct.

According to officials, the overall increase is largely fueled by a nearly 26% jump in reports involving Army soldiers. It’s the largest increase for that service since 2013, when such reports went up by 51%.

The increase in Navy reports was about 9%, the Air Force was a bit more than 2% and the Marine Corps was less than 2%, said the officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the reporting has not yet been made public.

The big increase is especially troublesome for the Army, which is struggling to meet its recruiting goals and is expected to miss the target by at least 10,000 — or by anywhere from 18% to 25% — at the end of September. Army leaders have acknowledged that it is important for parents and others who influence recruits to feel comfortable that their son or daughter is safe and will be taken care of in the service.

COVID-19 and the pandemic restrictions make year-to-year comparisons complicated. Officials said they do not have enough data to determine if — or how much — the pandemic played a role in the higher reporting and survey numbers.

The Pentagon and the military services have long struggled to come up with programs to prevent sexual assaults and to encourage reporting. While the military has made inroads in making it easier and safer for service members to come forward, it has had far less success reducing the assaults, which have increased nearly every year since 2006.

The double-digit overall increase comes after two years of relatively small increases in reports filed by or involving service members. In the budget year ending September 2020, reports of sexual assault and unwanted sexual contact edged up by 1%, as much of the world largely shut down due to the pandemic. The previous year, reports went up by about 3% — a substantial improvement over 2018, which also saw a 13% increase.

The widespread restrictions on travel and movement for the military continued during fall 2020 and the early part of 2021, and many businesses, restaurants and bars were shut down or had limited service. Things began to open up as more people were vaccinated in the summer and fall, but it’s also not clear whether that greater freedom contributed to the increase in assault reports.

The Pentagon releases a report every year on the number of sexual assaults reported by or about troops. But because sexual assault is a highly underreported crime, the department began to do an confidential survey every two years to get a clearer picture of the problem. The 2018 survey found that more than 20,000 service members said they experienced some type of sexual assault, but only one-third of them filed a formal report.

The latest report, expected to be publicly released Thursday, estimates that about 35,800 service members experienced some type of sexual assault in the previous year, based on the confidential survey. That means that only about one in every five service members reported an incident that happened in the previous year.

Every year as many as 10% of the assaults that service members reported happened before they joined the military.

Officials familiar with the findings said survey respondents also reported increases in unhappiness in the workplace, as well as more sexual harassment, which can sometimes lead to other sexual assaults or misconduct.

Defense officials have argued that an increase in reported assaults is a positive trend because so many people are reluctant to report it, both in the military and in society as a whole. Greater reporting, they say, shows there is more confidence in the reporting system and greater comfort with the support for victims.

It’s unclear, however, whether the increased reports last year actually represent a growing problem or whether those who say they were assaulted were just more willing to come forward.

The Pentagon has been under persistent pressure from Congress to improve prevention and prosecutions. Lawmakers acted late last year to take some prosecution authority out of the hands of commanders and instead use independent prosecutors.

Victims rights advocates and others have argued that service members don’t trust the system and are often unwilling to go to their commanders with a complaint for fear of retribution. They also worry that commanders may not press ahead with some cases if they know the accused. Members of Congress argued that using independent prosecutors would make the process more fair, and make victims more comfortable coming forward.

An Indiana man was charged with raping an Indiana University sorority member before she mysteriously died at his parent’s house earlier this month.

Eric Montgomery, 33, was arrested Tuesday on a warrant for rape when the victim is “disabled or deficient,” as well as furnishing alcohol to a minor, according to court records.

The arrest came amid an investigation into the Aug. 17 death of Avery McMillan, 20, who had been heavily drinking before being picked up by Montgomery, who then plied her with more alcohol, police said.

Montgomery told police he met McMillan that morning near campus and had sex with her in the parking garage of her apartment building and at his house, according to WXIN.

The rape suspect also said he provided McMillan with weed and alcohol and consumed it with her. A search of his vehicle turned up two half-empty bottles of liquor.

Roommates of the college student told detectives she had “got a little more drunk than she intended or wanted to” at a party the night before. She then became “frazzled and aggressive” and exited the car in the middle of their drive home around 2 a.m.

The young woman was then seen on security footage trying in vain to access her Bloomington apartment without her key for almost two hours.

Much of that time was spent in the building’s parking garage, where McMillan appeared “highly intoxicated,” detectives told the station.

A 2010 Ford Crown Victoria believed to belong to Montgomery entered the garage around 5 a.m. and stayed there for about nine minutes before leaving, according to the article. McMillan was not seen in the garage after the car left.

At 9:45 a.m., a man called 911 from an off-campus house owned by Montgomery’s parents, police reportedly said. McMillian was reportedly found unconscious and unresponsive.

Montgomery was not charged in connection with her death, the cause of which remains unknown pending the results of an autopsy report.

McMillian was a “beloved” and “dedicated” member of Zeta Tau Alpha who “went out of her way to be an involved and present member of the chapter,” said chapter President Ella Gebke.

She hailed from Valparaiso, Indiana, about 200 miles north of the university, according to her sorority sisters.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre on Wednesday insisted that President Biden is “securing the border” against fentanyl, despite the potent opioid driving a surge in US drug overdose deaths.

Jean-Pierre made the assertion during a testy exchange with Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy on Overdose Awareness Day — after Doocy asked “when is the president going to do something?” about the more than 300 daily US overdose deaths.

“We see those same numbers as well. But the fact [is] that we’re, you know, we are securing the border,” Jean-Pierre said, citing data that showed a 200% increase of fentanyl seizures at the southern border in July.

“The fact that we are securing record levels of funding from DHS so they can stop illicit drugs from entering into the country, the fact that it’s not just drug traffickers that we’re dealing with as well, we’re stopping financiers. This is what’s happening with this — under this administration,” Jean-Pierre said.

The exchange grew heated as Doocy continued to press on the topic and Jean-Pierre snapped, “If Republicans want to help us stop overdose[s] and stop our kids getting overdosed because of these dangerous drugs, because of these fentanyl that we’re seeing in the streets, we’re happy to work with them. But they’re not.”

“I’m moving on,” she declared, ending the line of questioning.

Jean-Pierre on Monday defended Biden’s broader management of the US-Mexico border crisis, saying in a different exchange with Doocy that although record numbers of migrants are illegally crossing the US-Mexico border, “It’s not just that people are walking across the border.”

The number of migrants arrested at the border this year already surpassed last year’s record and is expected to exceed 2 million for the first time by the end of fiscal 2022 in September.

Although fentanyl seizures are on the upswing, there’s also a dramatic upsurge in fentanyl-related deaths during Biden’s presidency.

More than 107,000 Americans died from drug overdoses in 2021 — at least 71,000 of them from fentanyl and related compounds.

Biden didn’t personally comment on Overdose Awareness Day, but he released an Overdose Awareness Week proclamation on Saturday. That proclamation didn’t mention that the drug is largely manufactured in China and smuggled through Mexico.

Although Biden rarely publicly mentions the origins of illicit fentanyl, former President Donald Trump routinely boasted that he pressured Chinese President Xi Jinping to launch a crackdown, including adopting a possible death penalty for manufacturers.

Trump said in 2019, “I said to President Xi that we cannot let fentanyl into our country. Almost 100 percent comes from China. It’s devastating. As you know, better than I do, it’s devastating. And he has promised to… make it a criminal act at the highest level, which in China means the death penalty.”

Jean-Pierre said last month that Biden raised the issue of fentanyl exports during a phone call with Xi, but the Chinese government reportedly broke off cooperation this month with the US on anti-drug efforts following House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.

The number of overdose deaths grew steadily over the past decade due to the opioid addiction crisis as Americans hooked on prescription pain medications made by US pharmaceutical companies transitioned to using heroin often cut with fentanyl.

Fentanyl is increasingly pressed into counterfeit prescriptions and mixed into non-opioid drugs such as cocaine, killing unwitting users.

There were nearly 94,000 US drug overdose deaths in 2020, of which about 58,000 were linked to synthetic opioids such as fentanyl — a jump from nearly 71,000 overdose deaths in 2019, of which about 36,000 were linked to fentanyl.

Although fentanyl often is smuggled across the US-Mexico border, it also can be shipped directly into the US, including by darknet drug market vendors.

Fentanyl is used by prescription to treat severe pain, but according to the Drug Enforcement Administration, a dose the size of roughly 10 grains of table salt can be lethal.

The trial over the murder of Lynette Dawson has laid bare the unusual relationship between the killer, Chris Dawson, and his twin, Paul.

For almost all of their existence, the twins have essentially led parallel lives. But that all changed on Tuesday when Chris was found guilty of murdering his first wife Lynette 40 years ago.

Justice Ian Harrison found the 74-year-old spun a web of lies that demonstrated a consciousness of guilt and said he had “resolved to kill his wife” after becoming “infatuated” with his student and teen babysitter, known as JC.

Chris was taken from the NSW Supreme Court in handcuffs and whisked away following the guilty verdict.

The focus on Lyn’s disappearance has highlighted the oddly close relationship shared between Chris and Paul, who have mirrored each other almost identically in the major facets of their lives.

The twins have always chosen to play the same sports on the same teams, live in the same neighborhood, and choose the same career paths.

They refer to themselves as “1 Twin” and “2 Twin”, with the latter referring to Chris as he was born after his brother.

The pair have even been seen sporting matching number plates with their nicknames.

After school, the athletically talented twins joined the same football team, the Newtown Jets.

When it came time to choose a career path, both men went to teacher’s college and, after graduation, would take identical roles at the same, or nearby, schools.

They also held the same part-time jobs as models, personal trainers, and garbage collectors.

Insight into the bond between the brothers can be seen in a 1975 ABC TV Chequerboard series, which interviewed Chris and Paul and even featured Lyn.

“Quite often, you will see a reflection of yourself and straight away you think, ‘Ha, it’s the other one, it’s the twin brother,’” one of the twins told the interviewer.

“Of course, on realization, it’s obviously yourself, you sort of have a little chuckle that you could be confused. Our whole lives really are a mirrored reflection of each other.”

The interviewer then asks: “Do you think it’s hard on your wives to be married to twins … you are so close?”

Paul Dawson replies: “Quite often, friends of our wives say, ‘What’s it like sharing your husband?’”

He added: “When they first start dating twins, I think they realize the relationship between twins. I think they tend to accept it and they wouldn’t enter into anything like marriage unless they did accept this bond or this relationship between your husband and his twin.”

Lynette Dawson then flashed on the screen for a few seconds, saying that she hadn’t thought about “sharing a husband” until “somebody asked a couple of years ago”.

She said: “To me, it just seemed so silly. You just join in.

“You encourage their closeness, not that it needs encouraging.”

Seven years after the interview Lyn vanished, leaving Chris free to marry the young schoolgirl girl that he had formed a sexual relationship with.

JC had become the couple’s live-in babysitter at the age of 16 on Sydney’s northern beaches, while Lyn was still alive.

Chris married the young woman in 1984, with the pair moving to Queensland where they lived in a house one street away from Paul and his wife Marilyn.

Scuffle outside court and Paul taking to the stand

Emotions were running very high on Tuesday afternoon after the guilty verdict was read, with Paul and the twins’ other brother, Peter, clashing with the media.

Police had to intervene after one brother appeared to nudge a cameraman.

“That’s my wife,” one brother said.

“I’m trying to get to my wife.”

After the scuffle, the media continued to follow the family.

A police officer tried to shield the woman from the media and kept their hand on her back.

The brother then hugged his emotional wife, who appeared to be crying and distressed.

Back in June, Paul took to the stand during his brother’s murder trial, claiming Lyn was “very positive” about the state of her marriage days before she disappeared.

He painted a positive picture of his brother’s marriage around Christmas 1981, days before Lynette went missing from her home.

Paul Dawson told the court that on Christmas Day he recalled speaking to Lynette and she was upbeat about her marriage.

“It was good,” Mr. Dawson said when asked by crown prosecutor Craig Everson about the state of his brother’s marriage in late 1981.

“Chris was being very positive towards it. I spoke to Lyn on Christmas Day, she was very positive about it. They were both looking forward to the future.”

Disturbing sex claims left out of Dawson case

The Supreme Court judge who decided Chris Dawson’s fate wasn’t told the shocking story of a schoolgirl allegedly passed around for sex by his twin brother, The Australian reported

Paul Dawson has denied wrongdoing, previously telling police his relationship with the girl, “Alice” started just after she left school.

In July 1982, when Alice was 17 but still at school, he allegedly began arranging for her to have sex with other men.

On another occasion, Paul Dawson allegedly called her to his office to perform oral sex on him during school hours. He had been her sex education teacher.

The girl made a statement to police about the alleged events, but it was the subject of a non-publication order by a coroner in 2003.

Paul Dawson was also allegedly having sex with another teenage girl who’d been one of his students, The Australian reported.

Chris’ children and three marriages

The retired teacher shared two children with Lyn.

The girls were aged two and four when their mother mysteriously vanished in 1982, which was the last time they ever heard from her again.

The elder, Shanelle, is now 44 and the younger daughter is 42, with both women remaining silent on the situation for decades before finally speaking out in 2018.

Shanelle broke her silence by telling 60 Minutes the absence of a mother left her feeling abandoned and confused for much of her life, but spoke fondly of her father, saying he was “fun”.

She said he was a loving father to her, and struggled to see him as the man that others made him out to be.

The younger daughter also publicly defended her father, claiming there was a “witch hunt” against him.

“My dad’s getting hounded because there are all these people that have got it in for him,” she told the Gold Coast Bulletin.

“Rather than focusing on perhaps that there could be someone else.”

C, formerly Chris’ babysitter and student, give birth to a baby girl a year after their marriage in 1984.

The pair divorced in 1990, with the woman now living back on Sydney’s northern beaches.

Chris then married his third and current wife, Sue Dawson, who he met shortly after his second divorce.

They were both working as teachers on Queensland’s Capricorn Coast at the time.

Sue was separated from her husband, with whom she shared twin children, Kobi and Jaga.

The pair got married and moved to the Sunshine Coast, with Sue’s children taking the Dawson name.

She has stuck by her husband as he faced repeated probes into the disappearance of Lyn.

Sue did not attend court on Tuesday where the guilty verdict was handed down and it is understood she remained at their Sunshine Coast home.

Defense Barrister Greg Walsh told media outside court that Dawson was “not doing well” and was very upset by the verdict.

“He’s upset, he wanted me to ring his wife Sue and talk to her … we don’t know where he’s going to go (to prison),” Mr. Walsh said.

Mr. Walsh revealed Dawson would appeal the verdict.

“Mr. Dawson has always asserted, and he still does, his absolute innocence … and he will continue to assert that innocence and he will certainly appeal,” he said.

A Holocaust survivor told a shocked courtroom in Germany on Tuesday how starving inmates ate the body parts of dead prisoners to stay alive.

Speaking via video connection from her home in Australia, Risa Silbert, 93, told the Itzehoe Regional Court in Shleswig-Holstein about the daily atrocities she and other prisoners faced at the Stutthof concentration camp.

“Stutthof was hell,” she said.

“We had cannibalism in the camp. People were hungry and they cut up the corpses and they wanted to take out the liver.”

Born to a Jewish family in Klaipėda, Lithuania in 1929, Silbert was taken to Stutthoff, in Poland, with her mother and sister in August 1944. Her father and brother were murdered by German collaborators in 1941.

While at the camp, prisoners were expected to report at 4 or 5 in the morning. Those who were took weak to stand were whipped by guards.

“None of us were addressed by name,” Silbert testified. 

“We were just called ‘bastards.’”

A typhoid epidemic meant that dead bodies were everywhere. At one point, Silbert and her sister hid under the corpses to avoid the SS soldiers. 

Silbert’s mother died of typhus in January 1945 — one of over 60,000 people who died at the camp since its founding in 1939. In mid-April of that year, as Nazi Germany’s power waned, the remaining inmates were marched 33 miles east to the city of Danzig, where they were then shipped across the Baltic Sea to Holstein.

The prisoners were liberated by British soldiers on May 3.

Silbert’s harrowing testimony is the latest development in the trial of Irmgard Furchner, who worked at a secretary at Stutthof from June 1943 through April 1945.

Now 97, Furchner is accused of assisting in the murder of more than 11,000 people during her tenure at the camp. She is being tried as a juvenile because she was under 21 at the time of the alleged crimes.

Despite the fact that she received daily letters and radio messages from Stutthof’s commander, Paul Werner Hoppe, Furchner claims she had no knowledge of the camp’s murderous designs.

Speaking to Der Spiegel last fall, her defense attorney Wolf Molkentin posited that “my client worked in the midst of SS men who were experienced in violence— however, does that mean she shared their state of knowledge?”

“That is not necessarily obvious,” he argued.

Furchner’s supposed ignorance, however, is challenged by the allegation that her husband, a former SS soldier, testified in 1954 that he was aware that prisoners were being killed at the camp.

Historian Stefan Hoerdler, another prominent voice in the case, alleged that Furchner hid SS soldiers in her apartment after the war, including Hoppe.

Hoppe, who died in 1974, served just nine years in prison in the 1950s for being an accessory to murder.

Furchner was first expected in court last September. In a handwritten letter to the judge, the nonagenarian said that she wished not to appear “due to my advanced age and physical impediments.”

“I want to spare myself the embarrassments and don’t want to make myself the laughing stock of humanity,” she wrote.

Furchner’s court date was further delayed when she slipped away from her nursing home outside Hamburg just hours before the trial was set to start.

Initially escaping by taxi, Furchner was apprehended a few hours later and held in custody, where a doctor deemed her fit to stand trial.

At the time, Christoph Heubner of the International Auschwitz Committee told the press that Furchner actions had “shown unbelievable contempt towards the state of law as well as to Holocaust survivors.”

According to the Associated Press, the case against Furchner relies on German legal precedent that any person who helped Nazi concentration camps operate can be held responsible as an accessory to the crimes committed there, even without direct evidence of participation in a specific incident.

Furcher’s particular prosecution was made possible by the 2011 conviction of John Demjanjuk, a former Red Army soldier who was captured by Germans and trained as an SS guard before being stationed at the Sobibór death camp.

After an 18-month trial – during which one Nazi expert called him “the littlest of the little fishes” – Demjanjuk was sentenced to five years in prison for his role in aiding and abetting the deaths of 28,060 Jews.

The judge in Demjanjuk’s case ruled that, regardless of how small a person’s role had been, they were “cog” in the “machinery of destruction” and should be held responsible.

Earlier this month, The Post reported on how Germany is grappling with how remaining Nazi accomplices – all of them ninety or older – will face justice for the Holocaust.

Orchestrated by Führer Adolf Hitler, the Nazi reign of terror saw the murder of at least six million Jews, as well as five million Poles, Soviet civilians and POWs, Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Afro-Germans.

In June, the Neuruppin Regional Court sentenced 101-year-old Josef Schütz to five years incarceration for his role in the deaths of over 3,000 prisoners at the Sachsenhausen camp. 

Like Furchner, Schütz vehemently denied the accusations. He is unlikely to serve any time in prison due to the lengthy appeals process.

But while the accused continue to try to evade justice, the testimony of survivors paints a vivid picture of horrors inflicted on inmates.

Speaking at Furchner’s trial last December, Stutthof survivor Joseph Salomonovic, 83, testified that “Maybe [Furchner] has trouble sleeping at night.”

“I know I do,” he told the court.

For her part, Risa Silbert says she still bears physical scars from beatings at the camp. She also insisted that Furchner plead guilty to her crimes.

“If she worked as the commander’s secretary, then she knew exactly what happened,” Silbert said.