Bruce McArthur pleaded guilty in a Toronto courtroom on January 29, 2019, to the first-degree murders of eight men. He was 67, a grandfather and self-employed landscaper who had spent years as a familiar, friendly figure in the bars of the Church and Wellesley Village, the heart of Toronto's gay community. The men he killed between September 2010 and June 2017 were Skandaraj Navaratnam, Abdulbasir Faizi, Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi, Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, Dean Lisowick, Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman. Most had ties to the Village. Six were immigrants or refugees from South Asia or the Middle East, and several lived lives that were partly hidden from their families or from the authorities.
For years, people in the Village said they believed someone was preying on men from the neighborhood. Toronto police formed a task force in 2012 to look into three of the disappearances, interviewed McArthur in 2013, closed the task force in 2014, and in 2016 released him without charge after a man reported that McArthur had tried to strangle him. He was caught only after the disappearance of Andrew Kinsman in June 2017, when the word "Bruce" on Kinsman's calendar and video of Kinsman getting into a van gave a second task force its lead. On February 8, 2019, Justice John McMahon of the Ontario Superior Court sentenced him to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. An independent review led by the retired judge Gloria Epstein reported in 2021 that the police handling of the missing men's cases had serious flaws and that systemic discrimination had played a part.
Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur was born on October 8, 1951, in Lindsay, Ontario, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. He was the second child and only son of his parents, and he grew up on a farm near Argyle, in the Kawartha Lakes district northeast of Toronto. His parents fostered troubled children from Toronto. The encyclopedia's account says religion divided the household, his father Presbyterian and his mother Catholic, and that he later told a therapist his father suspected he was gay and loaded him with heavy farm work. He went to high school in Fenelon Falls; CBC News found him in the school's 1969 to 1970 yearbook.
After high school he took a two-year business course at a college in Barrie. Around 1973, at about 22, he started at Eaton's in downtown Toronto as a buyer's assistant, doing mostly clerical work. A former colleague told CBC News in 2018 that "everybody liked Bruce." He married, and in the late 1970s he and his wife traveled in Europe, staying with that colleague's family in London. He later became a sales representative for hosiery companies, McGregor and Stanfield's among them, covering the Greater Toronto Area, and hired women to stock store shelves with him. People who worked for him remembered a jovial, respectful man who was never angry and who handed out Christmas gifts. "He was a really, really nice guy," one of them told CBC News.
He and his wife had a son and a daughter. By 1986 they had bought a house in Oshawa, east of Toronto. The Canadian Encyclopedia says he presented himself as a conventional family man active in his Presbyterian church. In the early 1990s he told his wife he was gay. They went on living together for a time, under financial strain from his loss of work and from their son's legal troubles, and separated in 1997. CBC News reported that the house carried a new mortgage in 1997 and that McArthur declared bankruptcy in 1999. The couple sold the Oshawa home in December 2000.
McArthur moved to Toronto after his marriage ended; a CBC News timeline puts the move in 1998. In the late 1990s he began a relationship with a married man that lasted about four years, and in 1999 he saw a psychiatrist about the difficulties that followed the end of his marriage and the start of his first gay relationship. That same year, CBC News reported, he met Skandaraj Navaratnam, and at some point in the early 2000s the two were in a relationship.
He became a regular in the Village. Acquaintances described him to reporters after his arrest as kind, generous and jovial, a man who "was part of the neighbourhood," in the words of a former Church and Wellesley bartender. Another man who knew him said he "could pass as straight." In the off-season from his landscaping work he played Santa Claus at a shopping mall, and photographs of him in the suit appeared on his Facebook page. He joined Facebook around 2011, and many of the photographs he posted of social events showed young men of Middle Eastern or South Asian descent. He was also active on gay dating websites.
In 2003 he founded a landscaping business called Artistic Design, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia, and built up a list of clients that included many older, well-off homeowners. Lacking space of his own, he stored equipment on clients' properties in return for free work. One client, whose garage held his tools, described him in January 2018 as a "cheerful, kind grandfather" who made floral gifts for charity auctions and did far more than their original agreement called for.
On October 31, 2001, McArthur attacked a man. He turned himself in and said he had blacked out. On January 29, 2003, he pleaded guilty to assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon. A psychologist's report in March 2003 found no mental health problem that explained the attack and rated his risk of violence as very minimal, CBC News reported.
On April 11, 2003, he received a conditional sentence of two years less a day, to be served in the community. The conditions, as CBC News described them, included a ban on entering the area of downtown Toronto that takes in the Gay Village, a 10-year weapons prohibition, anger counseling and an order to give a DNA sample. On June 3, 2014, the Parole Board of Canada granted him a record suspension for the 2003 convictions, which in effect removed them from his public criminal record.
Skandaraj Navaratnam, known to his friends as Skanda, was a Tamil refugee from Sri Lanka. In Toronto he did casual work, including for McArthur's landscaping business, and sent money home to his family, according to the Epstein review. He was 40. He was last seen early on September 6, 2010, after leaving a nightclub in the Village. Two friends reported him missing that month after not seeing him for several days; his family believed he might be in hiding because of his immigration status. The two had met in 1999, CBC News reported, and McArthur's Facebook profile listed them as friends. In court in 2019, his brother said the family had lost Skanda's support and had borne the cost of bringing his remains home, and that their mother, who was ill, still did not know the truth. A friend told the court he had long feared that Skanda had been killed.
Abdulbasir Faizi, called Basir, was born in Afghanistan and settled in Canada, where he married in 1999 and had two daughters. The family lived in Peel Region, west of Toronto. He was not out to his family. He was last seen on December 29, 2010, leaving a Village bathhouse, according to the Epstein review, and his cousin reported him missing the next day. On January 4, 2011, police found his car abandoned in midtown Toronto. The review gave his age as 42; CBC News reported 44 at the plea. Officers at the time suggested that he had left his family, and his wife, believing he had abandoned them, later divorced him, Global News reported. In her victim impact statement in 2019 she said his death had left her emotionally and physically unable to manage daily life, and that their daughters, who were six and 10 when he vanished, were struggling.
Majeed Kayhan came to Toronto from Afghanistan in 1989, worked as a rug salesman, and divorced in 2002. He was a familiar figure in the Village and stayed close to his children, according to the Epstein review. He was 58. He was last seen on October 18, 2012, and his son reported him missing on October 25. McArthur later told police he had known Kayhan for about 10 years and had had a sexual relationship with him; according to the agreed statement of facts, Kayhan had worked for McArthur's landscaping business for about a month. At the sentencing hearing his brother said the family had "agonized" since 2012 and that no statement could fully express their pain.
In November 2012, Toronto police formed a task force, Project Houston, to investigate the disappearances of Navaratnam, Faizi and Kayhan. On December 17, 2012, it obtained the first of about 40 sealed judicial orders, beginning with a vehicle tracking warrant. One line of inquiry, the Epstein review found, was an alleged ring of men interested in cannibalism, which arose from a tip linked to an informant in Switzerland; the review said the ring proved irrelevant to the disappearances. Another man was investigated as a suspect in Navaratnam's case and was found to have no connection to it, though he later pleaded guilty to unrelated child pornography charges. The Toronto Police Services Board, the civilian body that oversees the force, did not know about Project Houston while it was active, the review said.
On November 11, 2013, officers interviewed McArthur as a witness. They had found his online username and phone number in Navaratnam's email contacts, and the same username in a notepad that belonged to Faizi, according to court documents unsealed in 2019 and reported by CP24. Shown photographs of the three missing men, he said he knew Navaratnam through a mutual friend and denied a sexual relationship with him; he said he did not recognize Faizi; and he could not say where he had been when Navaratnam disappeared. He admitted the past relationship with Kayhan and said he had ended it because Kayhan kept asking him to buy things. He was not treated as a person of interest. CP24 reported that it was unclear whether investigators ran a background check, which would have shown his 2003 conviction.
On November 29, 2013, McArthur bought a maroon 2004 Dodge Caravan. Project Houston was shut down in April 2014 after 18 months without finding evidence of a crime, and in June of that year he received his record suspension.
Soroush Mahmudi came to Canada from Iran as a refugee in 1985. He worked at different times in taxi driving, construction, landscaping and painting, and the Epstein review remembered him as a devoted husband and stepfather. He was 50. He was last seen on August 15, 2015, in Scarborough, and his wife reported him missing on August 22. Her victim impact statement, read in court by an assistant Crown attorney while she sat in the gallery, said she had fainted when she learned he had been murdered, had been unable to work since, and depended on social assistance and food banks.
Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam fled Sri Lanka in 2010 as one of 492 Tamils aboard the MV Sun Sea, which reached British Columbia after a six-week voyage from Thailand. In Toronto he lived without legal status, worked as a handyman and sent money to his parents, according to the Epstein review; The Canadian Encyclopedia says he was under a deportation order. A fellow passenger on the ship remembered him as "innocent, trusting and helpful," a well-liked man who sang songs and played cards during the voyage. His family last spoke to him by phone in August 2015. Police believe he was killed on or about January 6, 2016, according to a Canadian Press list of the victims; a CBC News timeline gives January 9. He was 37, the youngest of the eight. He was never reported missing, because his family feared deportation, the Epstein review found, and he was the only one of the eight without clear ties to the Village. Police had to release a composite image to identify him. At the sentencing hearing his sister said the world had "become so terribly cruel."
Dean Lisowick was raised partly in foster care and later lived in the Village; at the time of his death he had no fixed address, according to the Epstein review. His age was reported variously: about 43 in the review, 43 or 44 in early police information, and 47 in CBC News reports at the plea. He was last seen leaving a downtown shelter program in late April 2016, and police believe he was killed on or about April 23, 2016. Like Kanagaratnam, he was never reported missing. Friends described him to Global News as caring, with a big heart. His daughter told the court she had never had a relationship with her father and now had to explain to her own children how he died; a cousin said she felt no hatred toward McArthur but had suffered nightmares and illness since the murder.
On June 20, 2016, a man McArthur knew told police that McArthur had tried to strangle him, according to the CBC News timeline; the man got away and called 911. The Crown later described the incident in court as an "attempted choking." McArthur went to police himself, told them the encounter had been consensual, and was released without charges; officers found his account credible, and his record check came back clean. A Toronto police sergeant was later charged under the Police Services Act with insubordination and neglect of duty over the handling of the complaint. He pleaded not guilty in 2019 and wrote to colleagues that he believed he was being made a "scapegoat." On August 23, 2021, the retired superintendent who heard the case acquitted him on all counts. "I will not pretend that this investigation was perfect," the hearing officer said. "It was not." But nothing showed, he said, that further steps would have given the officer reasonable grounds to act.
Selim Esen was born in Turkey and held university degrees in sociology and philosophy, his brothers said. He had worked in textiles, as a barista in Australia and as a café manager in Istanbul before moving to Canada in 2013, where he married and later separated, according to the Epstein review. He had just completed a peer counseling program at St. Stephen's Community House when he disappeared; his brothers said he wanted "to provide help and support to people in the local community." He was 44 at the time of the plea (the review gave 43). He was last seen in midtown Toronto over the Easter weekend, on or about April 16, 2017, and a friend reported him missing on April 30. McArthur later told police he had met Esen on the street and did not know his name. At sentencing a family friend, speaking for his brothers, said McArthur had "preyed on [the] gay community's trust" and asked how the killings "went unnoticed for seven years." Another friend described Esen as a romantic who believed in love.
Andrew Kinsman was a long-time HIV/AIDS advocate and volunteer in the Village. He had worked as a bartender, was the superintendent of his building, and volunteered with the Toronto People With AIDS Foundation. He was 49. He was last seen near his home in Cabbagetown on June 26, 2017, the day after Toronto's Pride parade. His friends noticed almost at once that something was wrong, in part because his elderly cat had been left alone without food or water, and a neighbor reported him missing on June 29, the CBC News timeline says. He had known McArthur for about 15 years, one of his sisters told the court. His sisters searched for him for six months before McArthur was charged. At the sentencing hearing a younger sister described him as an extraordinary, caring person and urged people to be kind; a brother said he now had nightmares and looked at strangers differently; and a tenant of his building spoke about his baking and his work in the community.
The speed of that report mattered. Inspector Hank Idsinga said later that if Kinsman had not been reported missing within 72 hours, police might have missed a key piece of evidence. Officers found the name "Bruce" written on the calendar in Kinsman's apartment for June 26, and they collected video from a camera that showed him getting into a van that day.
Detective David Dickinson cross-referenced vehicle registrations and found five possible matches; only McArthur's van had matching chrome siding, according to the CBC News timeline. Dickinson later said the calendar was a key piece of evidence that led police to McArthur.
In August 2017 Toronto police formed Project Prism to investigate the disappearances of Esen and Kinsman; The Canadian Encyclopedia dates its creation to August 14. The task force also examined Mahmudi's disappearance and the 2016 complaint, the Epstein review said. Police first named McArthur as a suspect in September, Idsinga said later. Mobile surveillance began on September 6, and on September 14 police obtained a tracking warrant for two of his vehicles. On September 16 McArthur sold the Dodge Caravan to an auto-parts business outside Toronto. Police towed it away on October 3. On November 8, 2017, forensic tests found Kinsman's blood in the van, and DNA from Esen was also found there. McArthur was now a suspect in Kinsman's murder.
On December 5, police made a brief covert entry into his apartment under a general warrant and left when someone approached. On December 7 they returned and copied his computers and hard drives.
On December 8, 2017, Chief Mark Saunders told reporters that the evidence did not point to a serial killer in the Village. The remark was later called "inaccurate, and unfortunately misleading" by the Epstein review. The review also found that in mid-July 2017 police management had vetoed a prepared public warning to gay men about meeting strangers through social media, out of concern that it would link the victims' use of social media to their deaths; no such warning was issued until December 2017.
On January 17, 2018, forensic analysts working on McArthur's devices found photographs of several of the missing men, some of which he had tried to delete. The next morning, January 18, 2018, police arrested him in Toronto; another man who was with him was unharmed, police said. McArthur was 66. He was charged that day with the first-degree murders of Selim Esen and Andrew Kinsman.
Over the following weeks police carried out searches across Toronto, and they began recovering remains in January 2018. On January 29, 2018, he was charged with three more counts of first-degree murder, for Majeed Kayhan, Soroush Mahmudi and Dean Lisowick, and police for the first time called him a serial killer. "It's a serial killer," Idsinga told reporters. "We do believe there are more and I have no idea how many more there are going to be." He said McArthur had "taken some steps to cover his tracks."
He was charged with Navaratnam's murder on February 23, 2018, with Faizi's on April 11, and with Kanagaratnam's, the eighth count, on April 16. A warrant document of April 12 said police had no evidence that anyone had helped him. The forensic search that followed was the largest in the force's history, according to The Canadian Encyclopedia. The investigation drew on the Ontario Provincial Police, the RCMP and other agencies.
Saunders's comments became a lasting source of anger in the Village. In an interview with The Globe and Mail after the arrest, he said that while police were investigating the Village disappearances, information about McArthur had not come out of the community. "We knew that people were missing and we knew we didn't have the right answers. But nobody was coming to us with anything," he said, according to CBC News. LGBTQ leaders called the remarks victim blaming. "You can't turn around and say the community did not do anything," said Haran Vijayanathan, executive director of the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention. Kristyn Wong-Tam, the city councillor whose ward includes the Village, said concerns had been "percolating for years" and that she had raised them with officers. Saunders released the full audio of the interview and urged people to "hear for yourself," and Mayor John Tory defended him. In 2019 Saunders said his December 2017 statement had been "accurate and right" on what police knew at the time.
On October 22, 2018, McArthur waived a preliminary inquiry and was ordered to stand trial on all eight counts. In November a judge set the trial for January 6, 2020. It never took place. On January 29, 2019, before Justice John McMahon in the Ontario Superior Court in Toronto, McArthur pleaded guilty to all eight counts of first-degree murder, answering "guilty" in a quiet voice as each man's name was read.
Crown attorney Michael Cantlon told the court that each killing involved planning and deliberation. The 36-page agreed statement of facts, read at the sentencing hearing the following week, said McArthur had strangled at least some of the men and had kept belongings of several of them, including jewelry. Investigators recovered photographs of seven of the men from his devices, although he had tried to delete them. Cantlon said McArthur had targeted men on the margins of society: men who were not out to their families, men facing housing or financial hardship, and immigrants, most of them of South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. He said that McArthur's decision to waive the preliminary hearing showed "some remorse."
The Crown asked that the parole ineligibility periods run consecutively, for a total of 50 years. McArthur's lawyer, James Miglin, asked for 25, citing his client's age. About 30 victim impact statements were filed, and family members, friends and community groups spoke over the first days of the hearing. McArthur said nothing when given the chance to address the court.
On February 8, 2019, McMahon sentenced him to life imprisonment on each of the eight counts, to be served concurrently, with no eligibility for parole for 25 years. He called the murders "pure evil" and said McArthur had shown no remorse in his dealings with police, but he declined to impose consecutive periods. A longer term, he said, would be largely symbolic, and there was "a fine line between retribution and vengeance." He gave weight to the guilty plea, which spared the families and the community a long and painful trial, and to McArthur's age. McArthur would be 91 before he could apply for parole, CBC News reported, and the judge said it was very unlikely he would ever be released. McMahon described him as a sexual predator who would have kept killing had he not been arrested, and said the crimes had instilled fear and distrust in Toronto's LGBTQ community, which he also called strong and resilient.
The judge ordered McArthur's name added to the sex offender registry, banned him for life from owning weapons, ordered a DNA sample and barred him from contacting the victims' families. Some relatives and friends were angry that he had not received the harshest sentence available. "It's not enough for the families, it's not enough for the lives lost," said a friend of Kinsman, Esen and Lisowick. Saunders said he did not expect McArthur to be seen in public again: "Life will mean life." A memorial for the eight men was planned at the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto for that Sunday.
In July 2018 the Toronto Police Services Board hired Gloria Epstein, a retired judge of the Ontario Court of Appeal, to conduct an independent civilian review of how police handled missing person investigations, with Mark Sandler as lead counsel. To protect McArthur's right to a fair trial, her original terms of reference barred her from examining anything after September 1, 2017, when police first identified him as a person of interest in Kinsman's disappearance, and from examining police contact with him at any time. The day after the guilty pleas, she asked the board to lift those limits. Tory said he supported a broader inquiry, and Premier Doug Ford said he had not ruled one out. In July 2018, meanwhile, Toronto police had created the service's first dedicated missing persons unit.
Epstein delivered her report, Missing and Missed, to the board on April 9, 2021, and it was released on April 13. It ran to four volumes and 1,109 pages and made 151 recommendations. It found that the disappearances of McArthur's victims "were often given less attention or priority than the cases deserved," that some officers held stereotyped ideas about LGBTQ2S+ communities that impeded their work, and that systemic discrimination had contributed to deficiencies in several investigations, whether or not anyone intended to discriminate. It made no findings of individual misconduct.
The review found that Project Houston's tracking of key assignments had "depended largely on human memory and handwritten notes," that investigators were slow to see leads and links between cases, and that officers repeatedly failed to classify the reports as major cases, in breach of provincial standards, so that little information went into the mandated case-management system. Sandler spoke of "a series of lost opportunities to apprehend and identify McArthur," although the review could not say whether he would have been caught sooner. It addressed the view, held by many in the community, that police took the disappearances seriously only when Kinsman, a white man, went missing; the review called that view true but incomplete, crediting Kinsman's friends and family with drawing attention to the case and saying a proper investigation "should not depend on" who is loudest. Xtra reported that the review called the police refusal to link the Village disappearances to a possible serial killer its "most troubling systemic failure." The review also examined the 2017 cases of Tess Richey and Alloura Wells, which it found police had mishandled.
At a news conference on April 13, 2021, interim chief James Ramer and the board's chair, Jim Hart, accepted the findings. "We apologize for the anger, hurt and damage that caused," Ramer said. He announced that the missing persons unit would double to eight investigators, that every division would get a missing persons coordinator, and that a team led in part by a superintendent would carry out the recommendations.
At sentencing, McMahon said the crimes had left the LGBTQ community afraid. A friend of Kinsman's said after the plea that there would be no closure, and a victim impact statement filed on behalf of Toronto's South Asian and Middle Eastern LGBTQ community warned that if one killer had been among them, there could be others. The executive director of the Alliance for South Asian AIDS Prevention told the court that men McArthur had bought drinks for or chatted with online now felt mortified and anxious, and his organization ran support sessions for them. The Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto helped the owners of the property where McArthur had stored his equipment redo their garden; its minister told the court the murders had changed how the community saw itself. Advocates, among them the writer James Dubro, called for a public inquiry into the police investigations.
Earlier killings: In 2018, as police reviewed unsolved killings of gay men in Toronto from the 1970s "with a fine-toothed comb," questions were raised about whether McArthur, who worked in the city in his twenties, could be linked to them. CBC News reported in April 2018 that he had not been linked to those cases. He was charged only with the eight murders to which he pleaded guilty, and police said in July 2018 that they did not expect more victims at the properties they had searched.
Dates and ages: Reports differ on several details. Faizi's age was given as 42 by the Epstein review and Canadian Press and as 44 by CBC News; Esen's as 43 by the review and 44 elsewhere; Lisowick's as about 43, 43 or 44, and 47. Kanagaratnam's death is put on or about January 6, 2016, in a Canadian Press list and January 9 in a CBC News timeline. The sentence for the 2001 assault is described by CBC News as a conditional sentence of two years less a day; The Canadian Encyclopedia describes it as a year of house arrest, a curfew and three years' probation.
The 2016 complaint: McArthur told police in 2016 that the encounter was consensual, and he was released. The Crown later described it in court as an attempted choking.
October 8, 1951: Thomas Donald Bruce McArthur is born in Lindsay, Ontario.
About 1973: starts work at Eaton's in Toronto.
1986: he and his wife buy a house in Oshawa.
Early 1990s: tells his wife he is gay.
1997: the couple separate.
1998: moves to Toronto (CBC News timeline).
1999: declares bankruptcy; meets Skandaraj Navaratnam.
October 31, 2001: attacks a man; turns himself in.
January 29, 2003: pleads guilty to assault causing bodily harm and assault with a weapon.
April 11, 2003: conditional sentence of two years less a day, with a ban on entering the Village area.
September 6, 2010: Skandaraj Navaratnam, 40, is last seen in the Village.
December 29, 2010: Abdulbasir Faizi is last seen; reported missing the next day.
January 4, 2011: police find Faizi's car abandoned in Toronto.
October 18, 2012: Majeed Kayhan, 58, is last seen; his son reports him missing on October 25.
November 2012: Project Houston is formed.
November 11, 2013: police interview McArthur as a witness.
November 29, 2013: McArthur buys a maroon 2004 Dodge Caravan.
April 2014: Project Houston is shut down.
June 3, 2014: the Parole Board of Canada grants him a record suspension.
August 15, 2015: Soroush Mahmudi, 50, is last seen in Scarborough; reported missing August 22.
On or about January 6 or 9, 2016: Kirushna Kumar Kanagaratnam, 37, is killed; he is never reported missing.
On or about April 23, 2016: Dean Lisowick is killed; he is never reported missing.
June 20, 2016: a man reports that McArthur tried to strangle him; McArthur is released without charge.
On or about April 16, 2017: Selim Esen is last seen; reported missing April 30.
June 26, 2017: Andrew Kinsman, 49, is last seen in Cabbagetown; reported missing June 29.
July 2017: police management vetoes a prepared public warning.
August 2017: Project Prism is formed.
September 6, 2017: surveillance of McArthur begins.
September 16, 2017: McArthur sells the van; police tow it on October 3.
November 8, 2017: Kinsman's blood is found in the van.
December 5 and 7, 2017: covert searches under a general warrant.
December 8, 2017: Chief Mark Saunders says the evidence does not point to a serial killer.
January 18, 2018: McArthur is arrested and charged with the murders of Esen and Kinsman.
January 29, 2018: charged with the murders of Kayhan, Mahmudi and Lisowick.
February 23, 2018: charged with Navaratnam's murder.
April 11, 2018: charged with Faizi's murder.
April 16, 2018: charged with Kanagaratnam's murder, the eighth count.
July 2018: Toronto police create a missing persons unit; the police board hires Gloria Epstein to lead an independent review.
October 22, 2018: waives the preliminary inquiry.
January 29, 2019: pleads guilty to eight counts of first-degree murder.
February 4 to 7, 2019: sentencing hearing and victim impact statements.
February 8, 2019: sentenced to life, with no parole eligibility for 25 years.
April 13, 2021: the Missing and Missed report is released; interim chief James Ramer apologizes.
August 23, 2021: the sergeant who handled the 2016 complaint is acquitted of disciplinary charges.