Nearly two years after a 19-year-old Nigerian international student was shot and killed by a Winnipeg police officer during a mental health crisis, Alberta’s police watchdog says there are “no reasonable grounds” to charge the officer with a criminal offence.
Afolabi Stephen Opaso died in hospital on Dec. 31, 2023, after police fatally shot him during a well-being call at a University Crescent apartment building, where the University of Manitoba student had been staying with friends.
At a news conference the next day, Winnipeg police said Opaso was armed with two kitchen knives and acting erratically while two roommates were in the apartment.
A written decision by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team’s director Matthew Block, published on Wednesday, says it was “necessary” and “reasonable” for the officer to use his firearm.
Manitoba’s Independent Investigations Unit handed the investigation over to the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team in January 2024, after a “potential conflict was noted.” The IIU said a Manitoba Justice employee was a “close relative” of the involved officer.
ASIRT spoke to four civilian witnesses and three police officers who were at the scene. The officer who fired his gun did not speak to investigators, nor did he provide his notes or a report, which is within his “right to silence,” the ASIRT decision report said.
Investigators considered audio evidence from 911 calls, police radio and a recording taken by a roommate, as well as images taken by the Winnipeg police forensics team after the shooting.
ASIRT’s report comes months after Opaso’s family said the long wait for answers left them with a “profound sense of frustration” last December.
Opaso was staying with three friends at a Winnipeg apartment at the time of his death. Those friends spoke to ASIRT, telling investigators that Opaso had been crying, yelling and acting erratically the day before his death.
One roommate told investigators Opaso believed someone was after him, saying “They are coming for me” and “You can’t get me” on the day he died.
Another roommate left the apartment following an argument with Opaso, the report said, warning his two other roommates to stay in one of the bedrooms because Opaso had a knife.
The other roommates called police from inside the bedroom.
When police arrived, one roommate took an audio recording of police saying “Drop the knife, drop the knife!” to Opaso.
Opaso was shot three times, the report said. The autopsy found one bullet hit his left chest, one hit his left back and another hit his left hip. The gunshot to his chest passed through a lung and the aorta, the report said.
All three shots happened in quick succession, and there is “no evidence” Opaso stopped running at the officers while he was being shot, the report said.
Block wrote that “there was no time” for the officer to flee or use less-lethal force, like firing a conducted-energy weapon, with Opaso less than six metres away and running toward the officer and his partner.
“Had one of the officers used a [conducted energy weapon] on [Opaso] first and it had failed to stop him, [Opaso] would have reached them and it would have been too late for another method,” Block wrote.
“They were responding in a careful fashion when [Opaso] suddenly escalated and ran at them with knives.”
Block wrote that the knives “presented the officers with a lethal threat,” making the deadly use of a firearm “proportionate.”
ASIRT concluded there are “no reasonable grounds to believe that the [involved officer] committed an offence.”
Kash Heed, a former West Vancouver police chief, said it’s all too common for investigations into deadly police shootings to come to the same conclusion.
“We try to justify why this has taken place instead of trying to correct how police are responding to these types of incidents,” he said, wondering why “antiquated policy” has armed officers responding to mental-health crises in the first place.
Police leaders and policymakers — across national, provincial and municipal jurisdictions — must adopt a more “contemporary response” to well-being calls, Heed said, like less-lethal enforcement tools or dispatching mental-health experts who are trained in crisis situations.
“We need to de-escalate as much as we can and try various options for that de-escalation. The last thing we need to do is escalate it to the point where deadly force has to be utilized,” he said.
Continuing to send armed officers to deal with mental health crises as a first resort is a “lose-lose” situation for both police and the public, Heed said.
“At the end of the day, this is an absolutely lose-lose [situation] for everyone, including society at large, because you have a young individual whose life was taken based on the crisis that he was in.”
