The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team has been called in to investigate an officer-involved shooting in southwest Edmonton that ended with the death of a 59-year-old man. The agency, which examines serious and fatal incidents involving police, is now piecing together a sequence of events that unfolded over several locations late on a Friday night.
According to the account, the situation began just before midnight on Friday, June 26th, when crews arrived at the scene of a crash between a vehicle and a fire truck. Before that collision, the male driver had reportedly attempted to assault emergency personnel with a blunt object, and then fled from the scene rather than remaining there.
As the night went on, police also received two additional hit-and-run reports in the southwest part of the city, all of them involving a vehicle of a similar description. In one of those reports, a driver said they had been assaulted with a blunt object, adding to a pattern of incidents that appeared to be connected to the same vehicle.
Following those reports, officers located a vehicle matching the description outside a home on Christie Vista Southwest. The discovery brought the search to a residential street, where the encounter that followed would ultimately become the focus of the watchdog's investigation into the use of force by police.
The team says a confrontation then took place between the suspect, who was armed with an edged weapon, and the responding officers. During that confrontation, one of the officers discharged a firearm, in an exchange that brought the series of events that night to a sudden and fatal conclusion.
Officers attempted to save the 59-year-old suspect after the shooting, but he was declared dead at the scene. The man, whose identity has not been released, was the only person reported to have died in connection with the incident, which remains under formal review.
With the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team now leading the investigation, the case follows the standard process in the province for incidents in which a person is seriously hurt or killed during an interaction with police. The watchdog's findings will determine how the events on Christie Vista Southwest and the earlier reports across the southwest are ultimately understood.