A coroner’s inquest will probe the death of a 35-year-old Burnaby man who was shot by police after a fatal stabbing in March 2015.
Travis Rood died on March 29, 2015 after Burnaby RCMP responded to reports of a stabbing at a rooming house in the 6100 block of 14th Avenue near Willard Street.
A person living in the house had left to call 911 after hearing “blood-curdling screams,” according to a March 28, 2017 report on the incident from the Independent Investigations Office.
He had returned with another witness to find Rood, one of their roommates, walking around, bleeding heavily from his wrist while another roommate lay unconscious and bleeding in his own room with a bloody knife beside him.
The two witnesses were waiting outside when police arrived.
The officers told them to stay back and went up the stairs and into the house with their guns drawn.
One of the witnesses followed and looked into the kitchen through a window at the top of the stairs.
At one point, he said he saw Rood take a knife out of a kitchen drawer and begin to stab himself in the torso.
The officers saw he had a knife and repeatedly ordered him to drop it.
He turned away momentarily, according to one officer, and then started walking, first toward one officer and then the other.
Neither the witness looking in at the window nor the officer who witnessed the shooting could see whether Rood was still holding the knife when the second officer fired, according to the IIO report.
Rood, meanwhile, kept moving forward after the gunshot and flipped over a railing at the top of the stairs, falling onto the pavement 12 to 15 feet below.
Both Rood and the stabbed roommate were taken to hospital, but neither survived his injuries.
The B.C. Coroners Service, the Independent Investigations Office (IIO) and the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team all conducted investigations.
The coroner’s service will hold an inquest on Jan. 8, 2018.
“The B.C. Coroners Service looks to gather the facts surrounding why a death took place and is not a fault-finding agency,” states a coroner’s service press release.
Burnaby RCMP were involved in three shootings in a single month in 2015.
On March 1, a suspect was shot following an alleged attempted robbery at the 7-Eleven at Canada Way and Edmonds Street.
Nineteen days later, on March 20, another man was shot by officers outside of the Lougheed Village apartments on Salish Court.
The IIO has not released findings for those two cases.
