THE father of a man shot by police in North Vancouver said Thursday he's satisfied with the recommendations of a coroner's jury following an inquest into his son's death.
Michael Wilcox said the jury did a thorough job of questioning what happened when a North Vancouver RCMP officer shot his 39year-old son Matthew Wilcox in January 2010.
He said he hoped their recommendations would prevent similar tragedies from occurring.
The five-person jury ruled Wilcox's death as a homicide, following an inquest this week.
Wilcox, who suffered from mental illness, was shot on a Deep Cove street by a North Vancouver RCMP constable on Jan. 9, 2010. He died the following day in Lions Gate Hospital.
The jury also issued eight recommendations - all but one of them directed at the RCMP.
The jury said RCMP officers' regular training should be expanded to include crisis intervention and de-escalation techniques for dealing with people who are mentally ill. They also recommended that special teams including both a police officer and mental health professional be available to respond to calls involving people who are mentally ill and two police officers be assigned to any situation involving a person with a history of violence to. Such teams should be equipped with "intermediate weapons" (including Tasers), according to the jury.
Among its other recommendations, directed to both the RCMP and Vancouver Coastal Health Authority, the jury wrote that all efforts should be made to accommodate family visits as soon as possible when a person arrested by police is brought to hospital and that family be informed when police release that person from custody.
Wilcox died alone in Lions Gate Hospital after family members were prevented from seeing him. At the time he died, police said they had lifted the ban on family visits but that message somehow did not get communicated to hospital staff.
"They wouldn't let us see him," said Wilcox's father Thursday. "It was awful."
The jury ruled Wilcox died of the gunshot wound, with both mental illness, cardiovascular disease and respiratory depression as complicating factors.
At the inquest this week, Wilcox's common law wife Shelley Beaudet described his struggles with mental illness and how when police were called they would generally exacerbate the situation "riling him up and roughing him up" when Wilcox was manic.
The officer who shot Wilcox - who cannot be named under a publication ban - told the jury he had been told by dispatchers and other officers that Wilcox was considered possibly dangerous, suicidal and emotionally disturbed.
Both that constable and a second North Vancouver officer who arrived on the scene said prior to the shooting they did not have specific ongoing training to deal with people who had mental illness, although they encountered people with mental illness "almost daily."
Since this shooting, the RCMP has introduced a course in crisis intervention for people with mental illness, said one of the officers.
The officer who shot Wilcox said he feared that Wilcox was going to kill him when Wilcox refused to obey commands to get down on the ground, and continued to approach the officer while pulling something out of his pocket. That turned out to be a cell phone.
