SIU Clears OPP Officer in Fatal Shooting of Kincardine Man Near Port Elgin
The SIU cleared the officer who shot Justin Germa near Port Elgin. Hours before the fatal confrontation, Germa sought help in a mental health crisis and was discharged from a Kincardine hospital.
Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit has cleared the OPP officer who fatally shot a 48-year-old man near Port Elgin in February, concluding the officer acted in self-defence after the man pointed a shotgun at him.
In a decision released June 19, SIU Director Joseph Martino found no reasonable grounds to believe the officer committed a criminal offence in the Feb. 21 death.
The man, whom the SIU does not name, was identified by his fiancée and a published obituary as Justin Germa, 48, of Kincardine.
A morning call for help
The day began with Germa seeking help. According to the SIU report, he called emergency services that morning over hallucinations he was experiencing.
Police and paramedics found him barricaded in a bedroom and, at his request, took him to the South Bruce Grey Health Centre’s Kincardine hospital.
Germa was discharged at about 9 a.m. The Director described him as being of unsound mind at the time.
A chaotic day of alleged crimes
Less than half an hour after his release, the SIU says, OPP received a report that he had tried to break into a home, and that he had left in a vehicle.
Over the hours that followed, Germa was alleged to have stolen several vehicles and broken into homes across the area, one of those break-ins involving the theft of a firearm.
He was never charged, and the allegations were not tested in court.
Officers tracked him after he took a set of car keys fitted with a tracking device, the report says, leading them to a rural property outside Port Elgin. Germa fled in a stolen SUV; an officer pursued as the vehicle passed tire-deflation devices deployed in the area, and it lost control and crashed into a snowbank.
Carrying a sawed-off shotgun, Germa ran to a nearby house and tried to kick in the door, according to doorbell-camera footage described in the SIU report.
When the two homeowners came to the door, he pointed the firearm at them, threatened to shoot, and demanded their car keys. They handed over the keys to a Volkswagen in the driveway and fled to their basement.
The shooting
The officer who fired and his partner arrived as the man got into the Volkswagen, the SIU says; another officer had pulled a police vehicle across the driveway to block it.
Armed with a C8 carbine rifle, the officer rushed to the driver’s door and ordered Germa to show his hands. He raised his empty hands.
When the officer opened the door, Germa took up the shotgun and pointed it at him, according to the officer’s body-camera footage as described by the SIU.
The officer fired eight rounds in about two seconds. The time was 3:51 p.m.
Officers pulled Germa from the vehicle and gave first aid. He was taken to the Southampton hospital and pronounced dead at 4:30 p.m. A preliminary autopsy attributed his death to multiple gunshot wounds to the torso and extremities.
Forensic testing found the shotgun was a modified Winchester with its barrel cut down — a weapon that met the Criminal Code definition of a prohibited firearm and was in working order.
The shells it held, however, were inert dummy rounds — a detail forensic testing established only afterward, and one the officer could not have known in the moment.
Why the officer faced no charges
Martino assessed the shooting under section 34 of the Criminal Code, the self-defence provision.
He found the officer fired believing he faced an imminent threat of death — a shotgun pointed at him at point-blank range, with no time to retreat or take cover and no less-lethal option that would have met the moment.
The eight shots, fired in about two seconds and stopping once Germa was incapacitated, were reasonable, the Director concluded. The file is closed.
Officials would not confirm identity
Neither the SIU nor the OPP has publicly confirmed who the man was. The SIU Act bars the agency from identifying the person at the centre of its investigations, and the OPP said it would not comment on another agency’s file. That is standard in SIU cases, where the deceased is often named publicly only by people close to them.
Owen Sound Current identified Germa through his fiancée, who confirmed his identity and Facebook profiles, and through an obituary that matches the SIU’s death date and the hospital where he was pronounced dead.
His fiancée’s account
Germa’s fiancée spoke to Owen Sound Current the night he died and in the days that followed, after posting about his death on a local thread and well before any official account of the shooting was available.
She said then that he had been with police that morning asking for help and should not have been released from hospital — key elements the SIU report released four months later would bear out.
She has struggled, she said, to understand how a morning that began with him seeking help ended in his death at a hospital she said he knew well. “The system failed him,” she said.
Owen Sound Current could not independently verify her account of Germa’s medical history, and South Bruce Grey Health Centre would not comment.
She said Germa had been treated for throat cancer at the Kincardine site, and that she believes the chemotherapy affected his mental health. A medication he began about a week before his death, she said, may have caused him to hallucinate.
Post-treatment, she said, Germa volunteered at the Port Elgin United Church and had turned to faith in his final months.
Open questions
The SIU report does not address why Germa was discharged that morning, or what care he received before he left. Those questions fall outside the agency’s mandate, which covers only the conduct of police.
South Bruce Grey Health Centre would not address those questions. Asked in general terms about the assessment and discharge process for a patient brought in during an acute mental health crisis, whether any review of Germa’s discharge was underway, and whether the coroner's office had been in contact, the hospital said it was “unable to comment.”
Because the death resulted from police use of force, it is subject to a coroner’s investigation. An inquest — a jury hearing that examines the circumstances of a death and recommends ways to prevent others — could take up the hospital discharge that fell outside the SIU’s mandate.
Under the Coroners Act, the office said, an inquest is mandatory when police use of force was a cause of a death. The Office of the Chief Coroner’s London office confirmed it is investigating Germa’s death but said it could not provide the details of an individual investigation.
The coroner’s office said the timing of any inquest depends on all related investigations finishing first: the death investigation, the SIU or police investigations, any other ministry investigations, and any resulting prosecutions and appeals.
That process can run one to five years or more, the office said, and lies outside its control.
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