Draft:Neil Hurtubise

Neil Hurtubise
Born	Neil James Hurtubise (1935-09-26)26 September 1935 Midland, Ontario
Died	19 September 2026(2026-09-19) (aged 90)
Spouse	Patricia Marilyn Mitchell (m. c. 1959; died 2021)
Children	3
Police career
Department	Ontario Provincial Police
Rank	Senior Constable
Awards	Police Exemplary Service Medal with bar Police medal for bravery

Neil James Hurtubise (26 September 1935 – 19 September 2026) was a Canadian police officer from Midland, Ontario, who served for 30 years with the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) at its Orillia detachment. Early on 2 January 1981 he was shot several times at close range while stopping a car on Highway 11 north of Orillia. Its two occupants, teenagers from Windsor, had earlier that night killed a service station attendant and Huntsville OPP Constable Richard Verdecchia. Hurtubise survived, returned to duty within four months, and went on to make more than 100 blood donations. The road leading to the OPP's Central Region headquarters in Orillia is named Hurtubise Drive, and in 2022 the City of Orillia proclaimed 2 January as Neil Hurtubise Day.

Early life

Hurtubise was born on 26 September 1935 in Midland, Ontario. According to his son, he was a keen athlete and baseball player who attended a Brooklyn Dodgers baseball camp. Before joining the police he worked for about 11 years at a privately owned shoe store, leaving when its owner planned to retire.

Police career

Hurtubise applied to the OPP in July 1964, at age 29, began training on 23 November 1964, and was posted to the Orillia detachment on 14 December 1964. He spent his entire 30-year career there, retiring as a senior constable. He was widely known in the community. In 2004 the local MPP recalled that Hurtubise had been respected by young people in the area, many of whom he had at some point lectured about their driving or behaviour. He later described policing as the best job in the world. In 2000 he received the Police Exemplary Service Medal and its first bar.

1981 shooting

Background

Gary George Fitzgerald, 18, and Joseph Schoenberger, 17, both of Windsor, had left home intending to steal firearms and sell them in Toronto. After stealing weapons from a hunting camp near Mattawa, they drove south on Highway 11 through central Ontario's cottage country. Late on 1 January 1981, Fitzgerald shot and killed Chester Blackmore, 50, a father of three working at a service station near Burk's Falls, reportedly over about $14 worth of gasoline. Police initially believed the attendant had been struck by a hit-and-run driver.

Shortly afterward, Huntsville OPP Constable Richard Verdecchia, 35, stopped the suspects' car after it slid into a snowbank at Highway 141 near Huntsville. He was shot through the open passenger window, then shot again, and his body was left in a snowbank; his cruiser was hidden on a nearby side road. His body was not found until the next morning.

Shooting

Hurtubise was working that night only because he had traded shifts so his family could attend his wife's younger sister's Christmas wedding. At the Orillia detachment he heard radio traffic about the missing Huntsville cruiser and drove north on Highway 11. Conditions were severe, with temperatures near −40, wind and snow, and the highway nearly empty. A few miles north of Orillia, near a rise known as the Big Chief hill, he saw a southbound car travelling without rear lights. It had been clocked on radar at 107 km/h. He made a U-turn and pulled it over.

As he approached, he noticed that the car's interior lights had been switched off. At the driver's window he was shot at close range, from about 30 inches away by his own account, with a .22-calibre rifle. Recalling the moment in 2021, he said his first words were "You don't have to shoot me." The first bullet passed through both cheeks and lodged in his shoulder, and a second struck his upper chest; he was hit twice more in the left side while on the ground. Contemporary reports described wounds to the chest, left shoulder, cheek and neck, and accounts put the total at four or five.

Hurtubise drew his revolver and fired three shots, and the suspects drove off. He crawled back to his cruiser and radioed an officer-needs-help call, relaying information that helped advance the police response. A local freelance journalist monitoring the police radio heard the call. The other two officers on duty at the Orillia detachment raced to help, and seven cruisers responded in all. Judging that an ambulance could not reach them quickly in the storm, a fellow officer drove Hurtubise in his own cruiser to Orillia Soldiers' Memorial Hospital. Hurtubise later credited the thick notebook in his chest pocket, and the OPP dispatch service, with saving his life. According to Orillia's mayor, one of his first questions afterward was whether the young men were all right, as he hoped he had not injured them when he returned fire.

His family learned of the shooting when a sergeant came to their home during the night.

Manhunt and arrests

The suspects abandoned their car outside a restaurant in Orillia and fled on foot through a blizzard. Police with a tracking dog followed their footprints in the fresh snow. The pair were found asleep in an old van at an auto body shop west of the city and arrested early that morning. They were initially charged with attempted murder, and later with the first-degree murder of Verdecchia, the second-degree murder of Blackmore and the attempted murder of Hurtubise.

More than 1,200 police and correctional officers from across Canada and New York State attended Verdecchia's funeral at Trinity United Church on 5 January 1981, along with Premier Bill Davis, Attorney General Roy McMurtry and Treasurer Frank Miller. Blackmore's funeral took place the same day in Burk's Falls.

Recovery

Hurtubise was admitted to intensive care in critical condition. He needed 30 units of blood, which fellow officers helped gather and deliver in the middle of the night. He was able to speak to his wife by telephone two days later. He was moved out of intensive care on 5 January 1981. Surgeons removed three bullets; a fourth remained in his shoulder. After about three weeks in hospital he went home, but returned for another three weeks because of pain. He was discharged on 13 February 1981, some 25 pounds lighter, and returned to work at the end of April.

Residents sent him a get-well card bearing about 4,000 signatures, and he later received a police medal for bravery.

Trials

Fitzgerald and Schoenberger were tried together in Barrie before Judge C. M. Craig. Fitzgerald's lawyer, Clayton Ruby, argued that his client had fantasized about killing police officers and was legally insane at the time. The Crown prosecutor, David Watt, called him "crazy like a fox." Schoenberger's lawyer, William Hechter, argued that his client had gone along out of fear of Fitzgerald. On 1 October 1981, after more than 20 hours of deliberation over three days, the jury rejected the insanity defence. It convicted Fitzgerald of the first-degree murder of Verdecchia and the second-degree murder of Blackmore, and he was sentenced immediately to life imprisonment without parole eligibility for 25 years.

Schoenberger was acquitted of the murder charges but was re-arrested as he left the courtroom, on the order of Crown attorney John Murphy, and charged with the attempted murder of Hurtubise. In December 1982, after an 11-day trial, a jury convicted him on five charges: the attempted murder of Hurtubise, being an accessory to Verdecchia's murder, the theft of a rifle from the Mattawa hunting camp, and the robbery of guns, ammunition and knives from a home near Huntsville. He was acquitted of being an accessory to Blackmore's murder.

Fitzgerald's escape

In October 1999, after serving 18 years, Fitzgerald walked away from the minimum-security Ferndale Institution in British Columbia, where he had been working as the prison library clerk, by missing the 11 p.m. bed check. The RCMP discovered his alias, and in January 2000 U.S. immigration officers and Los Angeles police detectives arrested him at a laundromat in Canoga Park, California, where he had been living as "William Joseph Jackson." The escape drew national criticism of security at Ferndale, which the Reform Party said resembled a resort more than a prison.

Policy impact and commemoration

The shootings, spread along about 75 miles of Highway 11, led the OPP Association to renew calls for two-officer patrols. According to the Ontario Police Memorial Foundation, the incident, along with others in the same period, was instrumental in OPP officers being issued protective vests. In July 2008 the Highway 11 bridge at Highway 141 near Huntsville was renamed the Constable Richard Verdecchia Memorial Bridge.

The events have been recalled in both provincial and federal legislatures. In May 2004, Garfield Dunlop, the MPP for Simcoe North, described them in the Legislative Assembly of Ontario while paying tribute to a Cobourg police officer killed that week. He said the Orillia area had been in shock and that residents had feared for Hurtubise's life. On 30 September 2020, Senator Gwen Boniface, a former OPP commissioner and Orillia resident, recounted them in the Senate of Canada while honouring fallen officers.

Later life and advocacy

Having needed so much blood after the shooting, Hurtubise resolved to repay it. He began donating about a year later and made 106 donations before medication forced him to stop around 2005. He then continued to volunteer at blood donor clinics, including making signs for them. He also volunteered for several years with an OPP trauma team supporting officers and families who had been through similar incidents, saying the work had helped him as much as them.

According to his nephew, during his recovery from the shooting Hurtubise, a musician, formed a police band that performed at Canadian Forces Base Borden, where his father-in-law, Wilmot Mitchell, worked in the civil service.

Hurtubise recorded memoirs of his career on retirement. Among the stories he knew was that of Provincial Constable Willis Jacob, killed in a head-on collision on Highway 11 in Orillia on 3 October 1958; the stretch of highway was long known locally as "Jake's Hill." At Hurtubise's suggestion, a bridge at the junction of Highways 11 and 12 was dedicated to Jacob in September 2019, and OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique publicly credited him with the idea.

In July 2014 he was one of five retired members honoured at the opening of the OPP Museum's "Behind the Badge" exhibit in Orillia, where he was noted for his community volunteering. In November 2019 he recounted his career and the 1981 shooting at a community event in Orillia, at which his daughter Elizabeth Anderson performed as a singer and described learning that her father had been shot.

In December 2022, at age 87, Hurtubise was robbed of $700 outside a TD Canada Trust branch on Peter Street in downtown Orillia. He had withdrawn the money as Christmas gifts for his children and grandchildren, and had held the door for the man who then snatched it from him. Community members rallied to replace the money, and former police colleagues visited him at home. Hurtubise said the response had shown him there were still good people around.

Honours

• Police medal for bravery, for the 1981 incident.
• Police Exemplary Service Medal and first bar, awarded 17 May 2000.
• Hurtubise Drive, the road off the Highway 12 bypass to the OPP Central Region headquarters in Orillia.
• Neil Hurtubise Day (2 January), proclaimed by Orillia mayor Don McIsaac, who had known him for more than 50 years, in December 2022 on the 42nd anniversary of the shooting. At Hurtubise's request, the first observance on 2 January 2023 was a lunch at George's Restaurant, his favourite, with family, friends and OPP officials rather than a formal ceremony.

Personal life

Hurtubise married Patricia Marilyn Mitchell around 1959. They had three children: Elizabeth, Michael and Anne Marie. His daughter Liz said he had always been generous with his time and quick to help others. Patricia, a past president of the Orillia Guild of Artists, a 20-year member of Quota International of Orillia and a parishioner of the Church of the Guardian Angels, died on 12 September 2021 after 62 years of marriage.

Death

Hurtubise died on 19 September 2026, a week before his 91st birthday. In a statement, the OPP Commissioner praised his courage and resilience. The statement noted that after being wounded in 1981 he had returned fire, called for assistance and relayed information that helped advance the police response, and said he had mentored and supported many officers over his career. The City of Orillia also mourned his death.