IIU clears officers in drug-addled man’s suicide

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This article was published 20/12/2022 (1014 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Winnipeg police officers tried to negotiate with a suicidal man high on methamphetamine and cocaine who slit his own throat, dying in hospital in mid-May.

The Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba, which probes all serious police incidents involving injury or death in the province, found in a report released Tuesday that the officers who responded to the May 14 call did not contribute to the 39-year-old man’s death in any way.

The IIU said one of the officers twice used a Taser electroshock weapon on the man, once successfully, as police tried to restrain him, but the province’s medical examiner’s office found the weapon did not cause the man’s death.

“The circumstances of this incident represents another tragic example of the negative and life altering effects of illicit drugs, particularly the scourge of methamphetamine use, in society,” the agency’s civilian director, Zane Tessler, wrote in his three-page report.

The Winnipeg Police Service notified the civilian agency of the incident in an apartment on Carriage Road the day it occurred.

According to the police notification, a woman had reported an argument with her boyfriend, who was trying to cut his own throat while armed with a utility knife as well as a butcher’s knife.

Officers went to the suite at about 5:24 a.m., where the man and woman had both taken cocaine and methamphetamine while two children, ages 10 and four, were asleep.

The two officers tried de-escalate by speaking with the man, who then “violently and rapidly” cut his throat, before police tried to restrain him using the electroshock weapon.

Two more officers arrived and began to give the man first aid, while Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service responders took him in an ambulance to the Health Sciences Centre, where he was pronounced dead at 6:10 a.m.

The IIU reviewed 911 call history and audio, police radio transmissions, officer notes and narratives, forensic reports, photographs, Taser data, and pathology and toxicology reports in its investigation. The agency deemed three officers as witnesses, as well as one civilian, but found no grounds to designate any officer as causing the man’s death.

“The options available to police in these circumstances were not many,” Tessler wrote, calling the incident tragic. “A (Taser) deployment was used to incapacitate (the man) but was insufficient as (he) had caused a catastrophic and ultimately fatal injury to himself.”

The man’s name has not been released.

erik.pindera@freepress.mb.ca