By Troy Gillard

defendant takes the stand

Mountie on trial denies asking woman in custody to lift shirt

Jun 20, 2019 | 5:31 PM

A Red Deer RCMP officer says that at no point did he ask a woman in custody to lift her shirt and how him her breasts.

Jason Tress, 32, has pleaded not guilty to sexual assault and breach of trust and has been on trial since Monday in Red Deer Court of Queen’s Bench. He took the stand in his own defence on Thursday.

The complainant, Melissa Heinrichs, told court earlier this week that Tress twice asked her to lift her shirt while she was in police custody on July 1, 2016.

The first time, she said, was while they were inside a police vehicle travelling to the downtown RCMP detachment from a south Red Deer hotel where Heinrichs had been arrested.

Tress said there was nothing sexual about what took place inside the vehicle.

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“Melissa, you are going to jail… I noticed you are not wearing a bra,” he recalled saying. “Is there anything I can get for you?”

Defence lawyer Robb Beeman then asked, “At any time did you make any inappropriate sexual remarks?”

“No,” replied Tress. “The only thing she may have got that opinion from is when I said I noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.”

Heinrichs claimed Tress also asked her to lift her shirt while they were in the fingerprint room at the detachment.

Tress again denied the accusation.

“Did you ask her to expose her breasts?” Beeman asked.

“Never,” Tress insisted.

“Did that (lifting her shirt) ever happen?”

“Never.”

Crown prosecutor Photini Papadatou questioned Tress over his choice to take Heinrichs into the detachment’s fingerprint room, where there was no video camera, and not one of the three interview rooms that did.

Tress claimed he did so in order to protect Heinrichs’s privacy from her boyfriend at the time, Keifer Collins, who was also in custody. He felt Heinrichs showed a desire to get away from Collins and the drug lifestyle they were involved in.

Heinrich and Collins were arrested that day in relation to a firearms complaint.

Tress, who remains on leave from Red Deer RCMP and is currently working in the oilfield, will finish cross-examination Friday morning before the trial moves into closing arguments.

Tress will be back in court next week for trial on another (unrelated) incident from 2016 in Red Deer involving a female complainant.

He will face a third trial in November for an incident from 2012.