SIU clears Hamilton police officer in fatal shooting of woman in 2018
Published October 7, 2019 at 5:05 pm
A Hamilton Police officer has been cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting death of a 30-year-old woman in October 2018.
A Hamilton Police officer has been cleared of wrongdoing in the shooting death of a 30-year-old woman in October 2018.
Joseph Martino, the interim director of the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), determined there are no reasonable grounds to lay criminal charges against a Hamilton Police Service (HPS) officer in relation to the fatal incident in a report released Monday (Oct. 7).
In the early morning of October 21, 2018, Hamilton police were called to an apartment building on King Street to reports of a woman who was ‘suicidal’ and wielding a knife and who had cut herself. She was also said to have attacked another person at the scene with a hammer
When police arrived on scene and confronted the woman, who was reportedly agitated, to defuse the situation, she is said to have charged the officers who tried to stall her progress with a Taser, which didn’t work. One officer opened fire, hitting the victim multiple times.
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Officers are said to have carried out CPR until paramedics arrived. The woman was then transported to Hamilton General Hospital where she was pronounced dead.
SIU was called in to investigate shortly afterwards and has since found that the officers were “acting within the scope of their lawful duties to protect and preserve life,” the report says.
The report concludes that given the mental state of the victim, the close proximity of the apartment in which the event unfolded and the short amount of time in which it all took place, that the officer who fired his gun was doing what he believed “was necessary to protect himself and his partner from a lethal threat.”
Click here to read the entirety of the SIU report.
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