Man who died in city police custody identified

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This article was published 18/10/2023 (742 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Grieving relatives of a man who died in Winnipeg police custody Sunday night are waiting for answers.

Family members from Webequie First Nation, a fly-in community in Northern Ontario, identified the man as Elias Whitehead.

Chief Cornelius Wabasse said residents of the remote First Nation are in shock.

“We don’t have any real information yet about what really happened,” Wabasse told the Free Press by phone Wednesday. “We can’t really say anything right now.”

Whitehead’s sister and other relatives travelled to Winnipeg following his death. His sister and his mother, who remained in Webequie, declined to comment.

The community is about 540 kilometres north of Thunder Bay.

The death is being probed by civilian police watchdog Independent Investigation Unit of Manitoba.

Limited information was made public by the Winnipeg Police Service and IIU in separate news releases this week.

The WPS said officers went to Broadway and Sherbrook Street shortly before 11 p.m., following allegations a male in distress was running into traffic and acting erratically.

Police said the man was taken into custody and went into medical distress.

The IIU said the man began to have trouble breathing during the arrest.

It also said Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service members immediately provided care to the man, as they were already present due to an unrelated incident.

The man was taken to Health Sciences Centre in critical condition and later pronounced dead.

The WPS homicide unit and IIU were notified. The IIU has taken over the investigation.

Alex Braun previously told the Free Press he and a group of friends witnessed officers forcefully take a man to the ground and arrest him.

No one in the group saw the moments leading up to the incident. Braun used his mobile phone to record part of the arrest.

The one-minute video showed two officers struggling with a man lying face-down on Broadway on the east side of Sherbrook. The man could be seen moving while he was pinned to the ground. He was punched and kneed by officers during the incident.

Additional police cars arrived, blocking the view of the camera.

A short time later, said Braun, WFPS members checked the man’s pulse and performed what looked like chest compressions.

The man was restrained and didn’t appear to be moving on the ground before paramedics took him to hospital in an ambulance, said Braun.

A second person, lying on the pavement nearby, was being attended to by first responders.

chris.kitching@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @chriskitching

Chris Kitching
Reporter

Chris Kitching is a general assignment reporter at the Free Press. He began his newspaper career in 2001, with stops in Winnipeg, Toronto and London, England, along the way. After returning to Winnipeg, he joined the Free Press in 2021, and now covers a little bit of everything for the newspaper. Read more about Chris.

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