Mounties ambushed

last updated 8 January 2015

Mayerthorpe, Alberta

Four Royal Canadian Mounted Police officers were killed last week during a raid on a marijuana farm, the deadliest attack on the Mounties since 1885. The policemen were guarding a shack they had searched when someone inside opened fire on them with a high-powered rifle. SWAT teams rushed to the farm, but the officers were already dead. The suspect, a convicted child molester named James Roszko, was also dead. He apparently shot himself after the gun battle. Albert Schalm, mayor of nearby Mayerthorpe, said he hoped the tragedy would call attention to the spread of massive marijuana farms in Canada. “There are drug problems,” he said, “even out here in rural Canada.”