WARNING: This story contains graphic, violent language. Discretion is advised.
Calgary’s seventh officer-involved shooting of the year involved a screaming 911 call, two bloodied men wielding knives and a running table saw next to a car with a hose venting exhaust into the back window.
Those are the details released by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) Thursday, two days after the horrific incident.
Police responded to a call from someone who screamed for help then hung up at about 11 a.m. on Oct. 11, ASIRT said in a statement.
When Calgary police officers arrived, ASIRT said a 21-year-old man covered in blood came out of the front door carrying a cellphone and a knife. ASIRT said he dropped the knife when police asked him to. He claimed he’d been attacked by a family member inside the home.
Watch below from Oct. 11: A domestic dispute at a Sundance home turned deadly Tuesday when Calgary police shot and killed a man. Tracy Nagai reports.
As police secured the house, ASIRT said officers forced open the door to the detached garage after hearing what turned out to be a table saw and a vehicle inside.
“Officers entered and observed a running vehicle with one end of a plastic hose attached to the vehicle’s exhaust and the other end venting into the back passenger window,” ASIRT said in a Thursday statement, noting no one was inside the car.
A bloodied elderly man holding a large butcher knife was also inside the garage. ASIRT said he had an “observable wound to the left side of his neck” and later confirmed he had at least three additional stab wounds.
“A confrontation occurred resulting in one officer discharging a single round from his police service weapon striking the man,” ASIRT said.
The 76-year-old man collapsed. Despite efforts to revive him, he was pronounced dead at the scene.
The ASIRT investigation is set to focus on the circumstances around the police encounter with the elderly man in the garage. The Calgary Police Service investigation will target the circumstances around the events between the two men before officers arrived at the home.
A Global News request for an interview with ASIRT was declined Thursday.
Calgary Police Chief Roger Chaffin spoke to the media after the incident Tuesday afternoon, saying he believed the officer in question did “the best he could” in the circumstance he was in. Chaffin said the investigation of the officer’s involvement would be handled by ASIRT.
“When we go to difficult calls like this, where there’s an extreme amount of violence and the chaos you experience in the initial moments of the call, things change quickly,” Chaffin said Tuesday. “I think it was a very short period of time from the time he actually entered the garage until it was concluded with a shot.”
Watch below from Oct. 11: CPS Chief Const. Roger Chaffin speaks to media after one man was shot and killed by a member of the Calgary Police Service.
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