A Dartmouth woman feared “for her life” after she said she and her husband found themselves in the midst of a fatal incident in Dartmouth, N.S., on Saturday morning, when police shot and killed a man who allegedly confronted officers with a weapon during his arrest.
Ronda Jackson-Spears, who was walking in the Maybank Field area towards the nearby Mic Mac Mall with her husband at the time, said the couple had to flee the area and hide behind a vehicle in the parking lot of a soccer field across from where the situation occurred.
“My legs were completely ‘Jell-o’,” said Jackson-Spears.
Albert Spears said they were at a crosswalk when a police truck pulled up beside them to block traffic. He said an officer got out and told the couple to “go, go, go”.
“We had to run away from there, over to the soccer field is where we went,” he said, “after that, we went down over the hill and there was a cop there with a machine gun on the other side of the field and there was another guy laying down in the grass with another gun.”
He said after they fled the scene, they weren’t sure what transpired.
“At first the cop was telling the guy to drop the phone, so I guess it could’ve been a weapon and they didn’t know, and they thought it was a phone … but I had to keep going so I didn’t hear much of that,” Albert Spears said.
Spears said he caught a glimpse of “a man” standing by a car in the parking lot. He said he had “something in his hand” and to him, it looked like a phone, but he said it also could’ve been a weapon.
Albert Spears said the area is somewhere the couple commonly walk through. He said every time he passes through the ballfield moving forward, he’ll think about the events of Saturday morning.
“I was surprised that happened right around here,” he said.
Ronda Jackson-Spears said after they evacuated the scene and made it to the mall parking lot, she began to wonder why an emergency alert hadn’t been sent out to alert the public.
“We were at the mall, and we were wondering ‘how come there wasn’t any text message alert for this happening?’, we didn’t get one at all, the whole day,” she said.
The couple said that they would like to see alerts sent out about situations like this in the future.
According to a release from Halifax Regional Police, officers responded to a weapons incident involving a man in the area of a sports field near Micmac Boulevard and Woodland Avenue at about 9:00 a.m. on Saturday.
“While attempting to arrest the man, he confronted the officers with the weapon, and officers discharged service weapons,” police said. “The man was taken to hospital where he was later pronounced deceased.”
Halifax Police have referred the incident to the Nova Scotia Serious Incident Response Team (SiRT), who will continue the investigation.
On Sunday, SiRT said they’re still awaiting autopsy results in response to a request for more information from Global News.
— With files from Zack Power
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