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Police cleared in Burnaby shooting death

In 2015, a man had broken into his ex-wife’s home and shot her boyfriend
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(Black Press files)

The police officers involved in the shooting death of a Burnaby man have been cleared of any wrongdoing.

In a detailed report released Tuesday, the Independent Investigations Office of B.C. said it would not be forwarding a report to Crown counsel about the officers who shot a man holding a bayonet rifle in his home in September 2015.

READ ALSO: Self-inflicted wounds not cause of death in Lower Mainland police standoff

Police had received a call from a Burnaby woman, saying her ex-husband was in her house with a gun and that there were babies in the home.

According to the report, she heard a bang on the door and then heard it “bust open,” and she told her former spouse to leave.

The woman said while she was on the call, her son came into the room and hit her ex-husband in the head with an electric guitar.

She told her boyfriend, who had come down to see what was going on, to get her ex-husband out of the house. But after stepping into another room, she came back to see that her ex-husband was holding a gun and her boyfriend had blood “pouring out from the other side of his neck.”

At that point, she told the operator her ex-husband had just shot her boyfriend.

“’Oh my God. He’s just shooting. Oh my god,’” the report reads

The woman told her ex-husband he was going to “rot in jail” and that police were going to kill him. He replied, “That’s what I’m hoping for.”

She heard two gunshots as she dashed outside the back door with a baby in tow. When she ran around the front, she met up with her son and saw fire trucks and police officers, including emergency response teams.

When police couldn’t make contact with the ex-husband, officers entered the home from the back and immediately came upon him.

The man pointed his bayonet rifle at the police, who shot him as he also turned the gun on himself and opened fire. He was hit with two bullets in the chest from the police officers’ guns and died instantly.

The IIO said the officers’ actions were “proportional, reasonable and necessary.”


@katslepian

katya.slepian@bpdigital.ca

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