Friends aboard stolen vehicle describe panic before teen’s death

Friends of Eishia Hudson cried Tuesday as they described the moments after she was shot by police and pulled from the driver’s seat of a stolen Jeep, following a high-speed pursuit and crash in 2020.

Three people who were inside the vehicle with Hudson testified at the ongoing provincial inquest, examining the life and death of the 16-year-old Berens River First Nation teen. The trio were all youths at the time of the incident and cannot be identified.

“She just kind of panicked,” a witness said, describing how police began tailing the stolen Jeep shortly after the robbery of a Sage Creek liquor store on April 8, 2020. A cruiser cornered Hudson when she pulled into a cul-de-sac in an attempt to evade police.

“She just took flight right away… It just happened so fast. I was having anxiety myself. Just kind of lost in the moment, I guess. I wasn’t sure what to do.”

He said he was sitting in the front passenger seat when Hudson reached the end of the road and wheeled the Jeep around to face the police cruiser.

Court heard Hudson, who didn’t have a driver’s licence, drove toward the officers and the Jeep made contact with the front of the cruiser.

Officers have testified she “rammed” the cruiser, but inquest counsel Dayna Steinfeld had raised questions over whether that word accurately describes the contact between the vehicle, noting the cruiser suffered almost no damage as a result.

That began a pursuit that saw police chase Hudson and the group of teens through the Sage Creek neighbourhood and onto northbound Lagimodiere Boulevard, where they reached speeds exceeding 100 kilometres per hour before Hudson crashed into a truck near Fermor Avenue.

The witness testified he remembered little about the crash.

He explained he met with Hudson earlier that day, and the pair consumed cocaine and marijuana. They had also been drinking alcohol with the other passengers, including in the Jeep after leaving the scene of the robbery.

“My vision was everywhere, it just kind of felt like a blur,” he said, adding he could not hear police commands as they swarmed the vehicle on foot in the moment after the crash.

He said an officer smashed the passenger window with a baton, pulled him from the SUV and arrested him. He did not know shots had been fired until the following day, when he woke up in police custody and a lawyer told him Hudson was dead.

A second witness who testified said everybody inside the vehicle was impaired “to some extent” and panic set in the moment police began to follow the Jeep.

“Nobody wanted to get locked up, nobody wanted to get in trouble. We were all kind of scared at that point,” he said.

After the crash with the truck, he thought the Jeep was stuck. He said he did not see Hudson put the vehicle in reverse and back up onto the median, but he could hear that “something in the vehicle was grinding.”

Testimony from police and video taken from a bystander at the scene shows the Jeep began backing up just as an officer arrived at the driver’s side door and tried to open it.

Const. Kyle Pradinuk testified last week he fired one shot at the Jeep because he feared his partner would be run over. He said he fired a second shot a moment later, after he heard grinding and saw the vehicle “lurch forward.”

The video appears to show the Jeep’s brake lights were on when the second shot was fired. It is unclear which bullet struck Hudson. An autopsy determined a bullet struck her in the left shoulder and lodged in her spine.

The second witness said he did not realize Hudson was injured until police pulled him from the vehicle and placed him on the ground beside her on the driver’s side of the Jeep.

“I saw she was bleeding quite a lot from the upper chest and she was bleeding on her mouth,” he said, before breaking down in tears.

Court paused as a woman from the gallery approached the witness to comfort him. He drank water and wiped his tears before composing himself and proceeding with testimony.

Under questioning, the second witness acknowledged the group had no plan during the pursuit and was acting on instinct. He told court the group discussed giving themselves up to police during the pursuit but Hudson kept driving.

A third witness testified that after the crash, she heard Hudson say, ‘We’re done. We’ve got to stop. We’re caught.’”

She, too, broke down in tears as she described watching police perform emergency medical care on Hudson.

A fifth person who was inside the stolen vehicle has not testified during the inquest.

Seneca Longclaws, the lawyer representing the First Nations Family Advocate Office, asked all of the witnesses a series of questions about their personal histories and interactions with police.

One witness said he had spent time in the child welfare system, but the other two did not.

All three had previously been arrested by police, and said those interactions caused them to distrust and fear officers.

None of the witnesses offered recommendations to the court on how to prevent such incidents from occurring in the future, but said they felt police should not have shot Hudson.

The officers involved in the shooting have already been cleared of criminal culpability. The inquest is not intended to assign blame, but one of its goals is to determine whether systemic issues or racism played a role in Hudson’s death.

The inquest will continue until March, with further testimony from civilian witnesses scheduled this week.

tyler.searle@freepress.mb.ca