Forty-nine seconds.
That’s how long it took from the time the first Vancouver police officer arrived on the scene to the time 26-year-old Abdi Gani Mahamud Hirsi lay dead after being shot multiple times.
Day two of the coroner’s inquest looking into the fatal shooting heard from officers who described the moments before Hirsi’s death.
Officers took the stand and described how the 26-year-old was in the middle of a random “stabbing spree” in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside when they arrived.
A dashcam video captured the scene from a parked vehicle.
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Const. Gregory Parks was only half a block away when the call came to respond to a man who was stabbing people.
Seconds later several shots can be heard from a non-lethal weapon firing bean bag rounds. Those shots were fired by another officer who had just arrived on the scene.
He told a coroner’s inquest that after seeing a knife in Hirsi’s hand, “I’m thinking at this point this guy’s going to stab someone else.”
Parks testified that the bean bag rounds didn’t appear to be working and then “Mr. Hirsi ran towards us … I had no other choice but to shoot at him.”
In the video, four or five shots can be heard.
Hirsi can then be seen running towards a nearby parkade where he starts stabbing a woman who has since testified she was provoking the situation.
At this point Parks gets close to Hirsi and fires another round of bullets.
Other VPD officers testified they decided to not shoot for fear of hitting the female who was being stabbed.
All the fatal shots came from one officer — Const. Parks — and it all happened within 49 seconds.
On Monday, two witnesses testified that Hirsi was acting aggressively at least two days before the fatal shooting.