Neighbours Sought Help for a Bear Spray Victim. Police Saw a Violent Threat

The family of a man who died after seeking help for a bear spray attack say they’re devastated to learn the Vancouver police officer who shot Chris Amyotte with seven beanbag rounds won’t face criminal charges or discipline.

Moments after being hit in the back and buttocks on Aug. 22, 2022, Amyotte, who was 42 at the time, went into medical distress. Paramedics could not revive him.

“I'm prepared to advocate for as long as I can and as hard as I can on Chris's behalf and his family's behalf, because it's just not right,” said Samantha Wilson, Amyotte’s cousin. “You just don't get to squeeze the trigger and then blame it on something else.”

The Independent Investigations Office, or IIO, a B.C. agency that investigates deaths and serious injuries that occur during police interactions, has finally published its report, three years after the incident.

The police officer who fired the beanbag rounds refused to do an interview with IIO investigators but provided them with a written report.

The IIO found that the beanbag rounds — considered to be a “less lethal” form of force — did not cause Amyotte’s death.

The BC Coroners Service, which conducted an autopsy, found that Amyotte died from a combination of bear spray exposure, methamphetamine and fentanyl use, an enlarged heart, obesity and being physically restrained.

The coroner found there were no signs of asphyxia caused by the restraints and the beanbag rounds did not cause any significant injuries.

The report paints a chaotic picture of Downtown Eastside community members pleading with police not to shoot a man who was in agony after being bear-sprayed.

In contrast, police officers on the scene were convinced Amyotte — a large, visibly Indigenous man — was a potential violent threat, in the throes of a questionable condition known as “excited delirium,” and had to be arrested.

Amyotte was a father of seven, as well as a grandfather, and was a member of the Rolling River First Nation in Manitoba.

Given the long history of discrimination and violence against Indigenous people in Canada — including by police — his family wanted a second opinion.

“At the time Chris passed away, his family paid for an independent autopsy to be conducted, because we knew what was going to happen,” Wilson said. “Unfortunately, we are from a group of people that seem to be singled out, and things like this happen and it gets pushed under the rug, and nothing becomes of those that bring harm to us.”

Wilson said Amyotte’s family is not ready to publicly share the independent autopsy report and The Tyee has not reviewed it.

The IIO report says that if police had taken a different approach — surrounding him and moving to subdue him only if he broke through — Amyotte might be alive today.

In a public statement, the Vancouver Police Department offered condolences to Amyotte’s family and said the IIO report proves that police actions did not cause Amyotte’s death.

“The months that followed this incident led to speculation and public commentary about how the man died, along with serious allegations against the officers involved,” Deputy Chief Howard Chow wrote. “Out of respect for the IIO’s process, we have been unable to share more facts about the case until now. This process has demonstrated why it’s important to allow a thorough investigation to take place, that provides answers for everyone involved.”

A naked man and a jug of milk

The Downtown Eastside is Vancouver’s poorest neighbourhood. It’s heavily policed and many of the people who live there struggle with poverty, ill health, trauma, drug use and mental illness.

It was the beginning of a hot summer day in late August 2022 when Downtown Eastside residents and workers noticed a large, naked man making a commotion on the 300 block of East Hastings Street.

Some watched him go into a convenience store, take a jug of milk off the shelf and pour it over his body. Others saw him rubbing his body and said he appeared “disoriented and distressed.” A witness The Tyee spoke to shortly after the incident said Amyotte was “jumping up and down” and screaming at times. Although witnesses said they saw a convenience store employee chase him out of the store after he took the milk, they said he wasn’t physically threatening anyone.

“He was clearly in pain and was distressed,” one of the witnesses told the IIO. “He was making sounds, but not clear words.”

Five out of eight of the civilian witnesses IIO investigators spoke to said they assumed the man was suffering the effects of being attacked with pepper spray or bear spray, a sticky substance that causes severe skin and eye pain. The witness who called 911 at the time even told the operator that the man had likely been pepper-sprayed.

And when police were converging on Amyotte with the beanbag gun, the witnesses said they told police two things: the man had been bear-sprayed and not to shoot him.

According to the police officers on the scene, however, none of them heard those people or realized that Amyotte’s behaviour was caused by the physical pain of being bear-sprayed. Video from the scene confirms that multiple people told police Amyotte had been pepper-sprayed.

One officer told the IIO that on seeing Amyotte, he assumed the man was in the midst of a drug psychosis or “excited delirium,” a controversial term for a state of drug-induced agitation that is thought to imbue people with “superhuman strength” and has often been blamed for police custody deaths.

The officer told the IIO that he thought Amyotte would die from the state of “excited delirium” if not apprehended, a common belief among police officers.

There is growing evidence that deaths attributed to excited delirium are usually caused by police restraints, leading to asphyxiation when an agitated person can’t recover from physical exertion because restraints interfere with breathing.

Amyotte was restrained by officers after being shot, held face down on the pavement with his arms handcuffed behind his back. Studies have shown that people who are being restrained forcibly in a face-down position have an increased risk of death. The position can make it difficult to breathe and put strain on the person's heart, lungs and other organs.

Increasingly, the diagnosis of “excited delirium” has been questioned by medical researchers and advocates. It’s no longer used as a cause of death by the BC Coroners Service and it is not recognized by the American Medical Association or the American Psychiatric Association. The Vancouver Police Department previously told The Tyee it has no plans to change its training on excited delirium following an inquest into the high-profile death of Myles Gray at the hands of Vancouver police officers.

The officer concluded Amyotte grabbing the jug of milk was theft rather than an attempt to wash off pepper spray. When Amyotte tossed the empty jug of milk away, the officer described the gesture as “an almost completed assault” towards nearby pedestrians.

A second officer told the IIO he was concerned Amyotte would walk into traffic, assault someone or harm himself. Other officers who arrived on the scene a bit later said they believed Amyotte was under the influence of drugs and was in a state of “excited delirium.”

The officer who fired the beanbag rounds at Amyotte said he believed Amyotte could be arrested for several infractions and that he was in an “apparent state of psychosis.” Amyotte’s large size — described by the officer as six feet two inches tall and 250 pounds — was a factor the officer took into account when deciding to use the beanbag gun to “de-escalate” the situation.

Wilson said her cousin was not that tall and estimated his height at five feet 11 inches.

The officer shot Amyotte after he did not respond to verbal commands to lie down on the ground. However, witnesses previously told The Tyee that they believed Amyotte wasn’t able to physically comply with those commands because of the pain of the pepper spray. The also said he was not moving quickly at the time he was shot.

Officers also said they didn’t notice any bear or pepper spray on Amyotte. However, a coroner’s report confirmed that bear spray was present and lists it as a contributing factor in Amyotte’s death.

The IIO report says the witnesses’ and the police officers’ conflicting versions of events are “noteworthy.”

“Several civilians immediately recognized that [Amyotte] appeared to be a victim in distress and attempted to communicate with him and offer assistance,” the report says.

“Police officers, on the other hand, seemed to see him as a risk to himself as well as a threat to public safety that needed to be taken down and overpowered as quickly as possible.”

The IIO’s civilian director, Jessica Berglund, concluded that Amyotte was “arrestable” for several reasons, including being naked in public and causing a disturbance.

An alternative plan of action could have been for officers to surround Amyotte on all sides, try to offer help and only try to take control of him physically if he pushed passed them, she wrote.

Berglund said past court decisions have determined that police use of force “cannot be judged, in hindsight, against a standard of perfection, and police actions are not criminal simply because one permissible option was chosen over another.”

Those words are cold comfort to Amyotte’s family. Wilson said she does not believe the coroner report’s conclusion that the shooting did not cause her cousin’s death and she would like to push to make beanbag guns illegal.

She is also concerned that the toxicology report — which found methamphetamine and fentanyl in Amyotte’s body — is being used to deflect blame from the police.

‘I knew... he would be dehumanized’

Wilson spoke at a press conference shortly after Amyotte’s death. “I really tried hard to make him seem human, because I knew that as this investigation went on, he would be dehumanized, and his lifestyle would become forefront,” Wilson said.

Wilson said Amyotte’s passing has been devastating for his family.

“He's missed by his dad, he's missed by cousins, his aunts, his uncles, his wife, his grandchildren, his children,” Wilson said.

“His absence is notably felt. His death has impacted everybody, that you can be here one day and gone the next, just like that. It took six minutes for his situation to escalate into him losing his life.”