RCMP failed to act over threats to professor: colleague

The RCMPare coming under fire from a colleague of John McKendy fornot protecting him after a series of warnings in the weeks leading up to thekilling ofthe popular St. Thomas University professor.

The body of the 60-year-old professor was found in his Douglas home, just outside of Fredericton, on Friday morning. The RCMP said Monday afternoon that McKendy died after being "struck with a blunt object."

Nicholas Wade Baker, 27, who had been wanted on achargeof first-degree murder, was found dead in a rented car at a Moncton hotel parking lot on Saturday.

Sylvia Hale told CBC Radio's Information Morning in Fredericton on Monday that she believes a public inquiry should be called into McKendy's killing. Hale said McKendy had forwarded the RCMP threatening e-mail the family had received from Baker.

"[McKendy] had been very frightened for the safety of his family for two or three weeks," Hale said. "This guy had been giving a litany of threats and the police sat on their hands and did nothing to protect that family."

Baker was married to McKendy's daughter.

RCMP Cpl. Claude Tremblay denied in an interview that the police were aware that Baker could become violent. On Oct. 3, Tremblay said the McKendy family reported to the RCMP that Baker stole a vehicleand was fraudulently using a family member's credit card in the United States.

He said an RCMP officer worked closely with the family and at no time did any of the accusations about e-mail threats arise.

"If there was at any time, the family felt they were fearing threats or they were fearing for their life, they would have told us," Tremblay said. "At any time none of those comments were made to us, no statements were given to us in relation to threats."

The stolen van turned up near Bangor, Maine, and RCMP tracked Baker to several states through his credit card use.

Hale is a sociology professor at St. Thomas University, a small liberal arts institution in Fredericton. The two worked together, and she said McKendy was the type of professor who always attempted to help make peace, even if it was just a staff squabble.

McKendy's former colleague is calling for an inquiry, saying police protocols must change in the case of domestic violence situations.

"Usually it is the woman that gets it, in this case it was a father protecting his family. But the police know the situation, they knew the threats, they knew this person was dangerous, they knew he was mentally ill and they still just do nothing, they keep saying, 'Until he has actually done something we can't do anything,'" she said.

Carmen Gill, the director of the Muriel McQueen Fergusson Centre for Family Violence Research in Fredericton, said she wants acoroner'sinvestigation into McKendy's death. Gill said such an investigation would look at what failed thefamily in this tragic situation.

"What are the gaps, where did we miss the target, any factors, any signsthat were already there that as a society we should have known?" Gill said.

According to Baker's funeral notice, he was born in Perth-Andover, N.B., on Feb. 5, 1981, and is the son of Wade Baker and Hope Parker-Sprague of South Carolina.

After graduation, the obituary said, Baker attended a computer college in Moncton and worked for two years in Alberta before being transferred to Fredericton, where he worked for a number of computer companies as a service technician.

Baker was married to McKendy's daughter on Dec. 29, 2007.