RCMP Shoot Unarmed Native Twice During Traffic Stop

Source: Indian Country Today Media Network

The tables were turned on a former star of the reality show Mantracker, in which contestants become prey stalked by the series’ stars, when he was shot by Canadian police in Alberta on August 1 during a traffic stop.

Two Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) officers were being investigated by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team after a run-in with Curtis Hallock, 38, an expert outdoorsman and horse whisperer of Grande Cache, the Edmonton Journal reported on August 3.

At about 10 p.m. on Thursday August 1, two RCMP officers pulled Hallock over “on suspicion that he was impaired,” the newspaper said. A confrontation of some sort ensued—police are not revealing details—and Hollock was shot, receiving two bullet wounds to a leg and one in the shoulder, his sister, Priscilla Bowen, told the Journal.

Though he fled on foot, he was apprehended and brought to the hospital, the newspaper said. Details were scant on what caused the confrontation, but Bowen was less concerned with that than with “how an unarmed man gets shot so many times by the police,” she told the Edmonton Journal.

This is a question being posed in Toronto as well, given the July 26 shooting of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on an empty streetcar by metropolitan police. As with Yatim, Hallock has no history of violence. Indeed, as his biography on the Mantracker Season Two website notes, “grizzly bear encounters and raging river crossings on horseback” are more his speed.

“Curtis has lived off the land surrounding Grande Cache for his whole life,” the bio says. “He cares for a herd of horses that roam free in the area and he considers the rugged wilderness and dense bush his own backyard.”

Former colleagues described the Mantracker sidekick, one of several who played alongside star Terry Grant, as one of their favorites, with a gentle temperament.

“In the seven years that we produced Mantracker … he was the number one sidekick that everyone loved and adored from all the sidekicks we had,” Ihor Macijiwsky of Bonterra Productions told CTV News.

Hallock was scheduled to undergo surgery for his wounds over the weekend.