A suspect is dead after a police shooting outside a west Edmonton apartment building early Tuesday afternoon.
The Edmonton Police Service said officers initially responded around 12:46 p.m. to a weapons complaint near 97 Avenue and 163 Street, where a man reportedly entered someone’s yard and pointed a gun at the home before walking away.
Police began scouring the Meadowlark area of west Edmonton and a few blocks away from the initial address, found a man matching the description in a back alley.
“A confrontation occurred, resulting in one officer discharging a firearm,” police said in a news release issued Tuesday night.
The shooting happened behind an apartment building on 156 Street, north of 98 Avenue, in the West Jasper Place neighbourhood.
Debbit Lamont has lived in the area for the better part of a decade and is shaken by what she heard go down outside her home.
She’d just arrived home from work and was laying down for a rest while her dog hung out on the patio, when she heard gunshots go off outside around 2 p.m. Tuesday.
“The dog jumped in the house and I jumped out of bed and I closed the patio door ’cause I was terrified,” Lamont said.
“I heard a ‘pop, pop’ and the police officers were saying, ‘Put your hands behind your back, put your hand behind your back!’ And then all of a sudden it stopped — it got quiet.”
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Lamont said she re-opened her patio door and saw an injured man.
“He was laying on the ground and there was blood coming from what, I seen, out of his head,” she said, adding police then began to do CPR on the man before she saw him taken away in an ambulance.
Lamont was terrified to hear the gunshots.
“It was the worst sound that I’ve ever heard. To know that it was not just, you know, firecrackers — it was a really loud ‘pop pop pop.'”
The alley behind the Westside Manor apartment building on 156 Street was then taped off, and several pylons marked spots on the ground were items like clothing had ended up.
“The gun is still in the alleyway where he was shot, and there’s blood there, and now everything is blocked off,” Lamont said late Tuesday afternoon.
Lamont doesn’t know if the man shot was living on the streets or a resident nearby, but admitted it can be a bit of a rough area.
“In the wintertime it’s really bad. Vagrants are in and out of the building, sleeping in the hallways, in the stairwells, in my building,” she said. “I got a deadbolt on my door and now a dog — hopefully she’ll protect me.
“It’s a little sketchy around here. Everybody calls it the ghetto, which, I mean — it’s happening everywhere, not just here, but it’s everywhere,” Lamont said.
Lamont said it’s been that way since the pandemic began in 2020, when Edmonton’s vulnerable population doubled.
“It is just chaos everywhere, you know?” she said, noting there are several spots in the west end where people living rough tend to gather. “What can you do? I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure that the police officers did their job, did the best they can, providing the safety of us.”
The Edmonton Police Service said EMS took the 36-year-old man to hospital, where he was declared dead. No EPS members were injured during the shooting. An object believed to be a firearm was found at the scene, EPS said.
Members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team arrived later in the afternoon to begin their investigation.
The government agency investigates incidents involving police officers that result in serious injury or death, along with allegations of misconduct.
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