A coroner’s inquest will be held into the death of the Mountie who was the face for the RCMP following the tasering death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport in 2007. The B.C. Coroners Service has scheduled the public inquest into Pierre Lemaitre’s death that will begin on Nov. 29, 2018.
The 55-year-old sergeant with the RCMP died by suicide at his Abbotsford home in July 2013.
In 2015, Lemaitre’s widow launched a lawsuit against the RCMP. The suit claimed the force made Lemaitre a “scapegoat” for Dziekanski’s death and that Lemaitre’s suicide was the result of the RCMP’s negligent conduct and its “intentional infliction of mental suffering.” The allegations haven’t been proved in court.
“As a result of this incorrect information, his immediate removal as RCMP spokesman, the subsequent public release of the private video … he was brought into public contempt where he was accused in the public of being the ‘RCMP liar’ and/or the RCMP spin doctor,” the statement said.
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Lemaitre’s initial accounts described Dziekanski as being distraught and behaving irrationally, adding that RCMP officers used two bursts of the Taser to immobilize him.
WATCH: Pierre Lemaitre on the stand at Braidwood Inquiry (April 2009)
Video later surfaced that appeared to contradict those accounts and an inquiry into Dziekanski’s death was also told that Lemaitre had watched portions of the video before issuing the first news release about the incident.
The B.C.’s Coroners Act allows the province’s chief coroner to hold an inquest “if the chief coroner has reason to believe that the public has an interest in being informed of the circumstances surrounding the death, or the death resulted from a dangerous practice or circumstance.” The inquest will review the circumstances around Lemaitre’s death and “whether there are opportunities for a jury to make recommendations that may prevent deaths in similar circumstances.”
— With files from the Canadian Press
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