Neighbour questions police shooting of stabbing suspect in Clayton Park

Four shots.

Jordan Bonaparte knew right away he’d heard gun shots. Rapid fire. Just after 10 p.m.

He went outside to see what was happening. He could see only one police vehicle with lights flashing, parked in the distance on Plateau Crescent in Clayton Park.

Less than 30 seconds after hearing the shots, he saw police cars, including SWAT teams, flooding into the normally quiet neighbourhood.

It was Thursday night and a man had been shot in front of Clayton Park Junior High School. Bonaparte watched the man being loaded on a stretcher.

“I was just standing in the street you could hear groaning – he was in pain.”

Bonaparte also overheard a police radio blaring from a police car.

“Someone was asking whether some constable was hit, so it seemed like a cop was shot.” 

Then he heard another voice on the radio confirming that a suspect was down and being transported to Queen Elizabeth II Hospital.

Halifax police would later say that a man was rushed to hospital with life-threatening injuries after being shot by an officer.

SEARCHING FOR SUSPECT IN STABBING

The confrontation started as police were combing the area, looking for a man they believed was involved in a stabbing earlier that night, the department said in a news release.

“As officers approached the man, he pointed a firearm towards the officer, following which the officer discharged their service weapon,” the release said.

Bonaparte was in a house across the street when the shooting happened. He said he heard nothing before the shots were fired, no conversation, no back and forth between the officer and the man. He said he believes that the officer was shooting not merely to subdue the man but to take “out the target.”

“The cop was really making sure this guy was down,” said Bonaparte. “It’s like if you were playing a video game and you fire four shots at the bad guy, you’re really trying to get them.”

On Friday, Bonaparte spoke to an investigator who told him that at least one of the shots fired had hit the school. 

The shooting has been referred to Nova Scotia’s Serious Incident Response Team, the province’s independent police watchdog.

Bonaparte says he’d like to know whether four shots were justified. He’s waiting to see the results of the SIRT investigation but isn’t convinced by the police version of events.  

“For the police to put out a press release saying he had a gun and we shot him is far from enough information to satisfy me.”

STREETS CLOSED

Plateau Crescent was closed until early afternoon Friday, while investigators were at the scene of the shooting. A section of the 200 block of Willett Street, about a kilometre away, was also closed temporarily. That was the scene of the stabbing that police were investigating before the shooting.

Earlier in the evening, Bonaparte had seen the police gathering at Willett Street. He suspects that the two events are connected.

Only a few blocks separate the locations. He figured that the man who ended up being shot may have been fleeing after the stabbing and been tracked down by the police officer.

SaltWire emailed several questions about the shooting to police but we were referred to SIRT.

Lana Lawrence lives in an apartment building beside the school. She said she heard four bangs. She also said she heard nothing before the shots were fired. She was startled by the number of police cars that showed up and immediately went out to see what was happening. Lawrence said she saw two police officers standing over someone in a stretcher.

“They kept saying ‘stay with us, stay with us,’” said Lawrence.

“It was pretty scary.”

Earlier this week, SIRT cleared a Halifax police officer who fatally shot a man, 59, in Dartmouth last August who police said was pointing a shotgun, ruling the action was necessary to protect the lives of police on the scene as well as the public.

In another police shooting this year, a man who police say confronted them with a weapon was killed in the area of a sports field near Micmac Boulevard and Woodland Avenue in Dartmouth. It wasn’t made clear at the time how many officers fired at the man or what sort of weapon he had.

With Ian Fairclough