Weapon traced to gunsmith, sources say
Police had planned to charge man they fatally shot for trafficking firearm used in teen’s murder
Toronto police allege the gun used to kill a 16-year-old boy in Scarborough last summer was traced back to Ontario gunsmith Rodger Kotanko — and officers intended to charge him with criminal negligence causing death for trafficking the gun, police sources told the Star.
Instead, Kotanko, 70, was fatally shot in a raid on his Simcoe workshop last November. Last week, Ontario’s police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), cleared the unnamed officer who killed Kotanko, saying that officer should not be criminally charged because he fired to “protect himself” after Kotanko refused to drop a gun he had pointed at police.
Officers with Toronto police’s Gun and Gang Task Force went to Kotanko’s residence, near Port Dover, on Nov. 3 to execute a search warrant, believing the skilled gunsmith had milled off the serial numbers on two restricted handguns registered to his company and then illegally transferred their ownership. Police allege the guns ultimately ended up in the hands of two young Toronto residents.
According to two police sources who spoke to the Star on condition of anonymity, police say one of those guns was used in the July 3, 2021, slaying of Caden Francis, 16, who was shot to death near Kennedy Road and Antrim Crescent in Scarborough — allegedly by two other teens.
The sources said ballistics testing conducted at Ontario’s Centre of Forensic Sciences connected the gun used to kill Francis with a firearm police allege was originally owned by Kotanko, from which he’d removed the serial number using a milling machine.
Police intended to lay the rare charge of criminal negligence causing death against Kotanko for allegedly trafficking the firearm used to kill Francis, the sources said.
A police source alleged four more of Kotanko’s guns are unaccounted for.
At a news conference outside the family home on Tuesday, Kotanko’s siblings, Jeff Kotanko and Suzanne Kantor, flatly rejected the notion that their brother, a renowned gunsmith and meticulous bookkeeper, was dealing guns on the side.
“Why? He could get $7,000 for one of his guns, easy,” Jeff Kotanko said. “One of those guns on the street in Toronto ain’t going to get that much money. So why would he bother to do that when he had a lineup of people waiting for him to build them guns? It makes no sense.”
Kotanko family lawyer Mike Smitiuch said by bursting into the shop of a gunsmith, police chose to “create a situation” that led to the “inevitable” outcome of Kotanko being shot and killed, along with “recklessly” endangering the customer who was inside.
Kantor said her brother was hard of hearing and his shop is dimly lit, with a thick front door.
“He probably wouldn’t have heard (police shouting) until they opened the door,” she said. “Then he would have turned around … and of course he would have had a gun in his hand.”
The family has alleged in a lawsuit filed this year that Kotanko’s death could have been avoided if Toronto police had “properly planned and executed the search warrant,” Smitiuch said.
Search warrant documents unsealed at the request of the Star previously revealed that late last year, police separately recovered two Norinco 1911A1 .45-calibre handguns they say they linked back to Kotanko. One was recovered in August 2021, allegedly from a young person who crashed a stolen Mercedes in Scarborough, and the other in October 2021, when officers with North Bay were investigating a “possible kidnapping” and pulled over a vehicle, and a youth was allegedly found to be in possession a handgun.
In both cases, the document says, the guns’ serial numbers appeared to have been “professionally” removed by a milling machine, as had other markings on the firearms’ slides. In the majority of cases, serial numbers are crudely removed with a file or rotary tool, the document said — not by a milling machine. According to the search warrant documents, police were able to restore the serial numbers, finding the weapons had been registered to D.A.R.K. International Trading Company, one of two businesses owned by Kotanko. The other business he owned was R.K. Custom Guns. The markings on the slides were also restored to reveal cursive “RK” letters on both, and “RK Custom” on the North Bay gun.
An experienced and licensed gunsmith with a certificate to acquire nonrestricted, restricted and prohibited firearms, Kotanko had “legally bought, sold, manufactured successfully transferred hundreds of firearms” during his career and would have known the rules around storing and reporting “lost or stolen” firearms, wrote Det. Const. Richard Haines, the affiant on the search warrant documents.
Kotanko would have reason to attempt to obliterate the serial numbers and markings and would have a milling machine to do so, Haines wrote.
Francis died from multiple gunshot wounds on July 3, one of 46 fatal shootings in Toronto in 2021. Two teens — a boy and girl, both 15, and who cannot be named under the provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act — have each been charged with first-degree murder in Francis’s death.