A person holds a sign with a photo of Myles Gray, who died following a confrontation with several police officers in 2015, before the start of a coroner's inquest into his death, in Burnaby, B.C., on April 17, 2023. The lawyer for the family of a B.C. man beaten to death by Vancouver police says a disciplinary report clearing the officers of wrongdoing was flawed and didn't consider key evidence about the 2015 fatal encounter. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck
VANCOUVER – The lawyer for the family of a man beaten to death by Vancouver police says a disciplinary report clearing the officers of wrongdoing was flawed and didn’t consider key evidence.
Ian Donaldson, lawyer for the family of Myles Gray, says the report by former Delta police chief Neil Dubord found allegations of misconduct in the 2015 death unsubstantiated.
Donaldson says the report may have found the seven officers involved in Gray’s beating death didn’t commit misconduct, but he doesn’t believe they were cleared because “important evidence” wasn’t included in the disciplinary probe.
Donaldson says this includes evidence from a coroner’s inquest into Gray’s death, including some given under oath, and he found its absence “surprising.”
He says the procedure to review police misconduct is “flawed and imperfect and incomplete,” and the findings undermine public confidence in police due to a “lack of respect for accountability.”
Gray, 33, died after being subdued by the officers after getting into a dispute with a resident near the Burnaby-Vancouver border.
He suffered injuries including ruptured testicles and fractures in his eye socket, nose, voice box and ribs.
The initial 911 call on the day he died was about an agitated man who was behaving erratically and who had sprayed a woman with water from a garden hose.
The Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner said on Thursday it was reviewing Dubord’s decision over the death of Gray, which was classified as a homicide by the coroner’s inquest last year.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 11, 2024.
