ALBERTA AMBUSH

A Rifle-Loving, Cop-Hating Killer Shoots Four R.C.M.P. Officers.
Canada Mourns, And A Debate On Drug And Gun Laws Intensifies

Nearly everyone in Mayerthorpe, Alta., a close-knit farming community
of 1,600 people, agreed Jim Roszko was trouble. At 46, he owned a rap
sheet with entries that ranged from sex offenses to unlawful
imprisonment. He also had a fondness for guns and guard dogs, and a
mean streak that frightened even family members. "He once put me in
handcuffs. It was a goof-around thing, but I was scared," remembers a
cousin, Lewis Lewchuck. Roszko's father Bill says he was a "wicked
devil."

Roszko also, apparently, nursed a churning hatred for cops. They would
not stop "bullying" him, he complained recently to a niece. On the
morning of March 3, Roszko's rage turned homicidal. Slipping quietly
up to a Quonset hut on his property 10 kilometers outside Mayerthorpe
where R.C.M.P. officers were waiting to serve him with arrest warrants
for stolen goods and marijuana cultivation, Roszko opened fire with a
Heckler & Koch .308 semiautomatic assault rifle. He nearly emptied the
gun, killing the four junior constables in the fusillade, the
high-velocity ammo piercing their soft body armor. It's likely he
saved a bullet for himself.

One man's private vendetta has left a nation in shock. The Mayerthorpe
massacre was the largest single-day toll inflicted upon Canada's
national police force since 1885, when 12 North-West Mounted Police
died in a clash with Metis rebels at Duck Lake, Sask. The four
murdered constables--Lionide Nicholas Johnston, 32; Brock Warren
Myrol, 29; Anthony Fitzgerald Gordon, 28; and Peter Christopher
Schiemann, 25--were just beginning their police careers. Their deaths
were a "very hard day for our nation," Prime Minister Paul Martin told
a hushed audience at the Liberal Party convention in Ottawa the next
day. "For almost as long as there's been a Canada, the Mounties have
served us, they have protected us, and they have kept us safe. That is
why we grieve so deeply when they're lost."

It did not take long, however, for politics to catch up with the
grief, as lawmakers debated whether the nation's gun laws or its drug
laws were culpable in the crime. As the first reports from Alberta
noted Roszko's alleged connection with a marijuana "grow-op," a
dispute broke out at the Ottawa convention over the government's plan
to decriminalize pot. Speaking for a large group of backbenchers,
Liberal M.P. Dan McTeague warned that the proposed legislation, which
reduces criminal penalties for possession of up to 15 grams of
marijuana to a C$150 fine, "may have the unintended effect of
increasing marijuana grow operations." Not so, chimed in Nick Taylor,
a former leader of the Alberta Liberals, who argued that the deaths
mainly showed that draconian antidrug laws only encourage violence.
"I'm not saying that four men would be alive if we had legalized
marijuana, but I suspect they might be," he said.

Police called for harsher penalties for grow-ops to stem what they see
as a virulent rise in the drug trade while pro-legalization advocates
viewed the murders as the work of a madman with easy access to an
assault rifle. Just as pressing was the question of how Roszko
obtained the murder weapon in the face of Canada's strict gun-control
regime. His high-powered combat rifle was a prohibited firearm, but,
says Wendy Cuiker, president of Canada's Coalition for Gun Control,
"Canada is full of military assault weapons."

It's not at all clear that the tragedy hinged on drugs. Roszko had 20
mature pot plants on his property, not really enough qualify him as a
major grower. "There's no more of a marijuana problem here than
anywhere else," Mayerthorpe Mayor Albert Schalm told Time. All the
same, marijuana and crystal methamphetamine are readily available in
the region.

Mayerthorpe residents say Roszko was a disaster long in the making. A
slightly built man with a hair-trigger temper, he had failed in nearly
every legitimate job he attempted, from cattle rancher to oil
roustabout. The youngest of nine children from a broken home, he was
feared by neighbors as well as his family. They gave him a wide berth.
"We all knew he had problems, and we wondered why no one helped him
before," said a neighbor.

Why, then, would the R.C.M.P. send lightly armed officers to bust a
known gun nut with an attitude? According to unofficial accounts,
police received word early Wednesday that Roszko had waved a gun at a
bailiff who arrived to repossess his truck. Armed with a search
warrant, two officers then visited Roszko's gated 200-hectare compound
at Rochfort Bridge, a hamlet near Mayerthorpe, about 130 kilometers
northwest of Edmonton. Roszko did not appear to be there. When the
constables entered a large metal storage shed, they found the pot
plants. Armed with handguns, they mounted a vigil until the two other
constables joined them the next morning.

About 9 a.m., Roszko somehow surprised them. R.C.M.P. backups
stationed outside heard gunfire, and within an hour police detachments
from Edmonton and Calgary had rushed to the scene. At 2:20 p.m.,
officers entered the hut and discovered the carnage.

In Mayerthorpe, the grief is intensely local. As in other small burgs
across Canada, the 11-officer R.C.M.P. detachment was a part of the
community. "Everyone knew these guys," says Rosemary Austen, editor of
the local weekly, the Mayerthorpe Freelancer. "They worked on
charities. They were coaches." Constable Johnston had recently been
recognized for his fund raising for a local boy fighting cancer.
Constable Myrol, the newest recruit (he joined Feb. 14), told the
Freelancer shortly before the shooting that he hoped to "make a
positive change in people's lives."

The debate over whether the killings in Rochfort Bridge could have
been prevented by stricter pot laws or better gun control is sure to
continue, but for the four murdered Mounties, it has come too late.

- --With reporting by Sue Bailey/Ottawa, Fiona McNair/Mayerthorpe and
Leigh Anne Williams/Toronto.