Police had ‘serious safety concerns’ for woman months before N.S. motel shooting

The 911 call came in to Truro police as a medical emergency.

It was May 27, 2023, and the woman on the other end of the line believed she was overdosing on fentanyl.

“She was in an excited state, and she reported experiencing false sensations,” Const. Jinhoe Kim of the Truro Police Service said in his application for a search warrant in the case, noting that the woman refused to provide police with any more information.

Two days later, police got a call from the woman’s employer, asking them to check on her at her Truro home.

Her “employer expressed concerns with her well-being because she notified them that she would not be able to work for up to a week,” Kim said.

That made the woman’s employer suspicious because “they were aware that she’d recently attended the hospital for a domestic-related situation,” the investigator wrote in information to obtain a warrant filed at Truro provincial court.

Wellness check

Police went to her home, where a man named Darren Jackson answered the door. He told an officer that “she was alive and well, but she refused to speak with (police) directly,” Kim said.

Flash forward to June 12, 2023, when Truro police fielded a call from the Inn on Prince. A hotel staffer told them they’d found a box containing 50 rounds of .45-calibre Winchester ammunition in a room where the same woman had been the most recent guest.

She later called the hotel “to claim a bag that she’d left behind in the room without specifying the ammunition,” Kim said.

When police contacted her, she “admitted to going through a serious substance abuse (problem) and being an escort to make ends meet,” said the investigator, noting she described Jackson as her “boyfriend who lives with her.”

A police database revealed the woman does not hold any type of firearms licence, and Jackson is banned for life from owning firearms and ammunition. His driver’s licence was also revoked.

Police surveillance 

Kim suspected Jackson was trafficking the woman for sex, supplying her with drugs, and may have a firearm.

He started staking out their place on June 28, 2023, looking for evidence of human trafficking and drug trafficking. The investigator followed Jackson, who was driving a blue truck, to a Tim Hortons parking lot on Willow Street.

“Jackson conducted a hand-to-hand transaction with the driver of another vehicle which lasted for less than 30 seconds before he drove away from Jackson,” said the investigator, who identified the man in the other vehicle as someone the RCMP had investigated in 2021 for cocaine trafficking.

“I reasonably believed this event to be a drug transaction,” Kim said.

On June 30, 2023, he and three other officers conducted surveillance of Jackson’s home again, looking for evidence of human trafficking and drug trafficking.

They followed him and watched as he conducted another brief “hand-to-hand transaction” with a man on Young Street who Kim knew to be a local drug user from previous police interactions.

Jackson then drove directly to a Pleasant Street address, where he “conducted another hand-to-hand transaction” with a woman, before heading to an address on Victoria Street to do the same.

After that, Jackson drove directly to Kaulback Street, where he “conducted another hand-to-hand transaction with the adult male driver of a silver 2013 Honda Civic bearing an Alberta licence plate,” Kim said.

‘Crack cocaine’

Police pulled Jackson over at that point, believing he was in possession of drugs for the purpose of trafficking.

When they arrested him, Jackson was “holding a piece of face tissue with blood in his hand,” said the investigator.

When police told him to lean against his truck to be searched, “a plastic bag containing what appears to be crack cocaine fell out of his hand onto the bed of his truck,” Kim said.

He searched the bag Jackson was carrying across his chest, locating a handwritten score sheet and cash.

Kim then went after the Civic driver they’d watched earlier, knowing him to be a “close associate” of many local drug dealers. The man “surrendered a small plastic bag from his trunk containing a lump of uncooked rice and a smaller plastic bag of what appeared to be crack cocaine with utterance from him that it was only 10 grams (of cocaine).”

‘More evidence’

The investigator put the drugs back in the Civic driver’s trunk because he hadn’t warned him of “his jeopardy of being arrested and charged for trafficking offences before” he handed over the cocaine, and the Civic’s trunk was “protected from unlawful search and seizure.”

Though he did tell the other officers on the surveillance squad to arrest the Civic’s driver for possession of cocaine for the purpose of trafficking, as the bag of coke in his trunk contained several smaller bags of crack.

Kim seized the truck Jackson was driving, and the Civic, believing “that they will contain more evidence of drug trafficking.”

He interviewed Jackson on June 30, 2023, who told Kim he’d been unemployed since January due to a workplace accident.

Jackson explained that two of the quick transactions police witnessed was him collecting money he was owed. He said that at Victoria Street, he was receiving a service from an escort.

‘Gets me every time’

Jackson “acknowledged the score sheet that was in his possession with an utterance of, ‘That gets me every time,’” Kim said.

Jackson told police “he is addicted to snorting cocaine and that’s why his nose bleeds often,” said the investigator.

Jackson later told Kim that “he uses cocaine, but he does not consider himself an addict,” and that the drugs he had on him were for personal use. “It’s the long weekend, so he had more cocaine than he usually does.”

Truro police had been aware of possible human trafficking, drug trafficking and illegal firearms activity involving Jackson, Kim said. “To any reasonable person, this would raise some serious safety concerns especially for” the woman he was living with.

Kim convinced a justice of the peace to grant a warrant to search the truck Jackson was driving and the Civic they’d stopped during their investigation for scales, cash, and other evidence of drug trafficking.

Ammo, magazine, drugs seized

Police didn’t find anything else in the truck, but they seized 9-mm ammunition, a child’s backpack containing a pistol magazine, pills, cocaine and magic mushrooms from the Civic.

Jackson, 52, is facing charges of assault, sexual assault and two counts of administering a stupefying substance for the purpose of overcoming resistance. Offence dates on those charges range from July 17, 2023, until Sept. 17, 2023. The woman who called Truro police in late May believing she’d overdosed on fentanyl is the victim named in all of those charges.

Her story doesn’t end there.

Shot at vehicle

Darren Trevor Jackson was arrested last fall for allegedly trying to kill her during an Oct. 15, 2023, shooting at a Brookfield motel.

At the time, Mounties said a man shot at her in her vehicle and missed around 8:30 p.m. outside the Sunrise Motel on Highway 2 in Brookfield. But the gunfire hit another woman who was with her.

Jackson, who is not facing trafficking charges, is slated to return to Truro provincial court Feb. 14 on two counts of attempted murder and a slew of other firearms charges.