(Sherbrooke) Nearly four years after her teenage son was shot in the head by a Sûreté du Québec police officer, a mother told the coroner’s inquest on Monday that she finally hoped to have a full account of what had happened to him on the day of his death.
Posted at 6:53 p.m.
Tracy Wing testified that waiting four years for answers for an event “that lasted 61 seconds” was disrespectful to her son Riley, to her, to the father and to the family.
Riley Fairholm, 17, was shot dead in the early morning of July 25, 2018 in the parking lot of an abandoned restaurant in Lac-Brome, in the Eastern Townships.
He was dressed all in black, and he was the one who called 911.
Police said when officers arrived they tried to negotiate with the teenager to drop a weapon – an air gun he had taken from his father’s home. The gun was found at the scene.
The interaction between police and Riley Fairholm lasted just over a minute, and then an officer shot him in the head.
“There was no negotiation – in 61 seconds you are not negotiating,” argued Mme Wing.
The teenager’s family has criticized the SQ and Quebec’s “police force”, the Bureau of Independent Investigations (BEI), for their lack of transparency. The event was investigated by the BEI and the Director of Criminal and Penal Prosecutions then decided not to bring charges against the police.
The family has since filed a civil complaint and with the police ethics committee.
Riley had never talked about wanting to be killed by the police, Ms.me Wing. She said she received a text message in the minutes before her son died, at 1:42 a.m., saying, “I love you.”
She said she rushed into the house looking for him and found a handwritten letter from her son saying goodbye.
Distraught, Mme Wing drove to the scene and came across flashing police lights and a body on the ground.
Her son was pronounced dead by a doctor at a nearby hospital, but it took 90 minutes for a policewoman to tell Mme Wing that Riley had been killed by the police.
She recounted telling the police officer that she had been “keeping her son alive for five years” and that the police had killed him within five minutes.
Mme Wing said her son was athletic, did well in school, always had friends and was close to his family. Things got complicated when he turned 12, she said, adding that his grades started to drop and he was suspended from school for behavioral issues.
She testified that she struggled to get proper help from the school for her son. Riley, she said, suffered from depression and was upset that he couldn’t graduate with his peers because he hadn’t passed certain required courses.
She said that following her son’s death, she had to fight for every bit of information. She said she had to fight the BEI to revise a public statement that the officers performed CPR on her son, which they failed to do.
“I tried to take the pieces I had and put a puzzle together, but I was missing a lot of pieces and it was important for me to know everything,” Ms.me Wing to coroner Géhane Kamel, who is leading the investigation at the Sherbrooke courthouse.
On Monday, the inquest heard from Juliette Blais, a friend who had a disturbing text message exchange with Riley in the hours before her death. She said he was not well and felt discouraged with life, adding that he was vague in his text message responses.
A day before Riley was killed, his friend Anders Koraen spent time with him in the waterslides. He said he didn’t notice anything in particular with Riley that day, but he knew he was suffering from depression.
Also on Monday, the inquest heard from a police surveillance investigator and a Montreal police crime scene technician who documented the scene.
Mme Kamel apologized to Mr.me Wing Monday for delays in the investigation, which is expected to last two weeks. The coroner has pledged to shed light on Riley Fairholm’s death and issue recommendations on how to better protect human life.