An RCMP officer who shot a 35-year-old man after a fatal stabbing in a Burnaby home two years ago has been cleared of wrongdoing in his death by B.C.’s police watchdog.
“The CCD (chief civilian director) does not consider that any officer may have committed an offence under any enactment and will not be making a report to Crown Counsel,” states a 13-page report released by the Independent Investigations Office (IIO).
The decision relates to a shooting March 29, 2015.
None of the people involved are named in the report.
On a dark, rainy morning at about 5:50 a.m., two RCMP officers responded to a call of a double stabbing at a Burnaby residence in the 6100 block of 14th Avenue near Willard Street.
One witness, who lived in the house, said he’d been wakened earlier by “blood-curdling screams” and had left the house to call 911.
He had returned with another witness to find one of his roommates walking around, bleeding heavily from his wrist while another roommate lay unconscious and bleeding out 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 his roommate 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 civilian witness nor the officer who witnessed the shooting could see whether the man was still holding the knife when the second officer fired, according to the report.
The man, 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.
“..one shot, bang,” the civilian witness is quoted as saying in the report. “Guy didn’t even flinch... and he walked to the railing at the top, jumped over, like that, onto his head.”
The shot man was then cuffed and taken by ambulance to hospital where he died at 10:41 a.m.
The cause of death was determined to be blood loss, but which of his many wounds ultimately caused his death is unclear, according to the doctor who performed autopsy.
“...the gunshot wound to the thigh is likely to have been the most significant contributor to blood loss in this case,” he states in the report. “However, significant additive blood loss may also have occurred as a result of sharp force injury to the chest and radial artery and from the large scalp laceration. The precise degree to which each wound contributed to death cannot be reliably established at autopsy.”
The IIO concluded the officer who fired his gun had reasonable grounds to believe it was necessary for him to fire his weapon to prevent death or grievous bodily harm to himself.
The report notes the officer would have be aware he was attending a residence where multiple stabbings had been reported and would have seen evidence to that effect when he entered the home.
“The subject officer would have seen at least some of the blood which tended to confirm a stabbing had occurred and that there may be danger,” the report states.
The report noted the officer who shot the man declined to be interviewed by the IIO or to provide any report, which is his Charter right.
The police watchdog also said that, at the time the decision was issued, it did not appear that the officer had completed any reports or notes of his recollection of the incident.
There are several IIO investigations related to Burnaby RCMP still outstanding, including two more from March 2015.
