Inquest to begin in N.B. police shooting of Indigenous woman during wellness check
Global News
A coroner's jury will be chosen Monday morning, and five days have been set aside for the inquest.
The lawyer for the family of an Indigenous woman fatally shot by police in Edmundston, N.B., during a wellness check two years ago said a coroner’s inquest opening Monday offers a chance for her loved ones to get long-awaited answers.
Chantel Moore, a 26-year-old member of the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation in British Columbia who had recently moved to New Brunswick to be closer to family, was killed on June 4, 2020.
Lawyer T.J. Burke says the Edmundston police department lacked the tools needed to de-escalate situations without using deadly force.
“In my opinion, the City of Edmundston suffers for the lack of technology,” he said in an interview last week. The city, he said, had “focused more on purchasing carbine weapons than they did on individual officers’ use-of-force weapons, such as Tasers.”
Investigators with Quebec’s police watchdog, the Bureau des enquetes independantes, concluded last year that the shooting occurred after an intoxicated Moore approached the officer with a knife in her hand.
Patrick Wilbur, regional director of New Brunswick’s Public Prosecutions Services, said in a report released last June that a former boyfriend of Moore called police at 2:06 a.m. to request the wellness check as a result of his concerns over a series of messages he had received over a period of a few hours.
The former boyfriend, who lives in Quebec, told investigators that at one point it appeared as if the messages were being written by a third party, and he contacted police out of concern for Moore’s safety.
According to Wilbur’s review of the investigation report, police arrived at Moore’s apartment at 2:32 a.m. and the officer knocked on a window and shone a flashlight on himself to show he was in full police uniform. The review says Moore came out of the apartment and moved in the direction of the officer holding a knife.