Now he’s a spiritual man who talks about lifting the veil of secrecy over an alpha-swagger police culture that treats post-traumatic stress disorder as a weakness.

But 12 years ago, he was a different man. He was the team leader of Special Weapons Team One on the elite Emergency Task Force.

He was the best of the best. An assassin if he needed to be.

However, nobody trained him how to deal with the crippling emotions, nightmares and flashbacks that followed.

How terribly ironic that it was in a major metropolitan hospital, where countless lives are saved, that he took a life with an assault rifle on New Year’s Eve in 1999.

With the streets full of revellers as the clock struck midnight, Bremner was staring down the barrel of an assault rifle ready to shoot to kill.

That tragic hostage taking at St. Michael’s Hospital and its after-effects have been recalled in grim detail in Crack in the Armor, a recent self-published book that Bremner co-wrote with freelance writer Connie Adair.

Five days after that shooting, Bremner became involved in a second hostage-taking shooting, where he came close to dying.

Bremner describes in candid detail his descent into post-traumatic stress disorder and his journey back in an attempt to demystify the signs and symptoms of PTSD.

In the book are strong, personal accounts from his wife, Dayle, and two former colleagues, who are now retired, that lend credibility and validation to his experiences.

Bremner currently works as a Toronto Police College instructor on the gun range, teaching officers how to deal with the stress of drawing their weapons.

“The message must get out,” Bremner says quietly over coffee. “The cop mentality of being afraid to ask for help must be broken.”

Bremner is not alone in his concerns.

In March, Ontario Ombudsman André Marin launched an investigation into how the Ontario Provincial Police deal with stress injuries, including PTSD, after he received more than 30 complaints from active and retired OPP officers, who allege they have been ostracized and stigmatized.

His report is not yet complete.

In the days that followed the hospital shooting, Bremner took to sleeping in an unfinished basement on a cold concrete floor. Sometimes he slept alone in the backyard. His relationship with his wife and two children became strained, at best.

The low point came in 2004 after speaking to colleagues in Belleville about the St. Michael’s Hospital shooting.

Bremner was found by another officer at the side of Highway 401 drunk and passed out with a gun in the car, which led to an impaired driving conviction.

Without counselling, “I had no way of processing all of that,” Bremner says. “I was reliving the event every time I talked about it. I would drive home from these things crying.”

He was going to kill himself and he later made other attempts, too.

Bremner finally sought treatment at the Homewood Health Centre in Guelph in early 2005, and emerged two months later transformed with skill sets, medication and a therapist.

In grim detail, Bremner recalls the horror at St. Michael’s Hospital just before midnight in 1999.

A 26-year-old man, Henry Masuka, had driven his infant son to the hospital with breathing problems and, when he didn’t get immediate assistance, he held an emergency room doctor hostage at gunpoint.

Bremner and his 10-member team answered the call.

Moments before shooting the man, Bremner had tried to defuse the situation.

“Hi, my name is Jim,” he writes. “How can I help you work this out?”

Bremner described the man as being “in a trancelike state” and unwilling to listen to reason.

Masuka told officers: “I’m going to end this” and moved aggressively and abruptly toward the doctor, Bremner writes.

Bremner and his teammate, Chris Lussow, shot Masuka from a metre away and tackled him to the ground.

The drama had begun at 11:45, and ended at 12:03.

It turned out Masuka was holding a pellet gun, and there was no explanation how he got it. Bremner says there were suggestions that the police planted it.

The events of that night “changed everything,” writes Mike Babineau, who was the team sergeant that night.

He suggests it wasn’t the media criticism that hurt Bremner most, it was the lack of understanding, support and recognition from the people within the service.

Babineau says he takes much of the blame for what happened to Bremner.

“I was there and he was my friend and I didn’t do anything,” he writes.

At about 5 in the morning, Bremner began to drink, “trying to come to terms with having killed someone and thinking that I had become a killer.”

On New Year’s Day, some officers didn’t leave the station until 11:30 a.m.

Babineau writes that “the boss asked if the team was coming in that night and I said no. I knew enough that we shouldn’t be coming back the next night.”

On Jan. 3, the tactical team had to be interviewed by investigators and the unit commander asked if they were coming back to work.

Before he could answer no, the other guys on the team, except for Bremner, said, “Yeah, we’ll be in tonight,” Babineau writes.

“I was thinking, something is wrong with this. I should have stood up and said, ‘I don’t care what you think. I’m the team sergeant and we are standing down.’ But I didn’t. We came back the next night and there was another shooting.”

Bremner thought it was too soon to return to work. However, to refuse would have been a sign of weakness.

“Tactical people aren’t good at saying no. That’s why they got the job. It’s not in us,” Bremner says, sitting in a coffee shop dressed casually in Hush Puppies, beige cargo pants and green short-sleeved shirt.

Two days later, on Jan. 5, Bremner encountered another hostage-taking incident. In a fight for control of the gun, the weapon discharged only inches between the suspect and Bremner’s chest.

Bremner didn’t know who was hit until he saw blood pouring from the suspect’s lower abdomen.

He regrets not seeking out a psychologist. Even now, he says, there is no mandatory order to speak to a psychologist, get debriefed and take time off.

Some time after that shooting, Bremner went to management and said, “I’m having a hard time with this.”

Bremner was sarcastically told, “Yeah, we’re all having a rough time.” Management did nothing, Babineau says.

Soon after that, the tactical team was broken up and Bremner was placed in the training office. Bremner was humiliated because he saw this as a punitive demotion.

Today, Bremner thinks that was the wrong move. One of the causes of stress, he said, is taking away your support network. He felt so alone.

Bremner says that post-traumatic stress among police is more prevalent than people know.

He says he’ll get calls in the middle of the night from officers around the country who want to talk about their troubles. He’s the link between police and psychologists because he has the credibility and cops trust him.

And he sees hope in changing the police culture.

“I think we’re out of the Dark Ages now,” Bremner says.

Bremner recalls an episode in 1986 that became an epiphany.

While walking the streets as a beat cop in 14 Division, he picked up a drunk off the streets. The man told him he used to be a fighter pilot.

“I thought, ‘Look at you. What a mess,’” Bremner writes. “Then one day I woke up in the gutter and the light went on. Now I understand, I thought. This is what happens to people who have been traumatized.”

On his last day of rehab, on a cold day in March, 2005, Bremner went back to the scene of the hostage drama at St. Mike’s.

The smell of the hospital swept over him as he entered the doors and tears welled up in his eyes as he could recall hearing a former teammate saying, “It’s over. It’s time to go home.”

Bremner’s eyes well up as he recalls the occasion.

The hospital had been renovated, but he sat down at what was then the nurse’s station and played out each moment, step by step, in his mind.

He soon realized he could change nothing that had happened. But what he could change were his feelings toward the events.

He sat for about five minutes, gathered his thoughts and walked out the rear door, got into his truck and drove home. His eyes were full of tears.

“I thought, ‘Now I know it’s over.’ That’s when I came home. Now I know it’s over.”