Margie Gray has filed a lawsuit to seek “justice and change” after the death of her 33-year-old son Myles following an altercation with seven Vancouver police officers in Burnaby on Aug. 13, 2015.
It’s been over six months since Myles’ death and Margie said the family still has more questions than answers.
They know Myles, a Sechelt businessman, walked away from his delivery truck that day in Burnaby and that somehow he ended up in a wooded area where seven police officers tried to subdue him with chemical agents and then force. He was unarmed, carrying only a water bottle, according to the family.
Margie said she doesn’t know the names of the officers who were involved or what exactly happened, but the result was the death of her only son.
“We’re beyond traumatized. I have no words. The word traumatized doesn’t even explain how we feel. Our family’s just devastated. I don’t even know how to go forward in life, honestly,” Margie told Coast Reporter this week.
She said that while nothing can bring her son back, she filed the lawsuit on Feb. 11 in the hope that his death “wouldn’t be in vain.”
“We want the police officers involved to be held accountable and going forward to have some change in their de-escalation training skills,” Margie said, noting she also hopes the lawsuit brings to light exactly what happened.
The civil lawsuit was filed against the seven officers involved who have not yet been named but are identified as John Does 1 through 7 (as well as four other officers who dealt with the case but were not on scene when the altercation with Myles took place), the Vancouver Police Board, the Vancouver Police Department and the City of Vancouver.
The city was named in the lawsuit as being “statutorily responsible and vicariously liable” for the acts of the officers and the police board.
The lawsuit alleges “some or all of the seven officers beat the deceased to death by inflicting massive physical traumas upon him through repeated grievous, violent assaults and batteries, including after they had detained and restrained him.”
It also alleges the officers “repeatedly failed to provide the deceased with immediate emergency care and to summon emergency health services promptly or at all, which each of them knew the deceased urgently required.”
Further the lawsuit claims that police “unlawfully impeded the investigation of the deceased’s killing by impeding the Independent Investigations Office (IIO),” as none of the seven officers involved in Myles’ death notified the IIO.
The IIO is charged with investigating all deaths involving police. Ultimately they were made aware of the incident; however, their investigation is far from complete.
Marten Youssef with the IIO in B.C. said the “timeliness” of the investigation into Myles’ death has suffered due to an influx of incidents needing investigation.
“This is largely due to a rash of officer-involved shootings and police-involved fatalities throughout the province, which began in September of 2014 and continued for the better part of a year. There is a total of 20 fatalities in a period of 12 months (12 of which are shooting fatalities). These incidents require the expenditure of enormous resources. That workload has made it impossible to keep up with our timeliness goals,” Youssef said.
Once the IIO investigation is complete, the IIO may report the matter to Crown counsel or release a public report explaining why the matter doesn’t warrant further action.
Margie is tired of waiting for answers and hopes the lawsuit will help expedite things.
“They killed my son and I want people to know about it, and they have to be held accountable,” Margie said.
She hopes that through the court proceedings a new standard in police de-escalation training can be set and officers throughout B.C. can be trained to that standard.
“It’s like comply or die policing. That has to stop. They need to step back and learn how to de-escalate a situation. And if somebody is having an emotional moment in life they need to know how to deal with that,” Margie said. “We want justice and change.”
The Vancouver Police Department did not return requests for an interview by Coast Reporter’s press time but department officials have said in the past they would not comment on the case while it was being investigated by the IIO.
