A coroner’s inquest began Tuesday into the death of a man shot by RCMP at Nanaimo’s Departure Bay ferry terminal more than six years ago.
RCMP officers shot 39-year-old Jerry Robert Smallwood, also known as Jer Wood, multiple times after he got out of his vehicle and raised a gun outside the terminal in May 2018.
Mounties were trying to arrest Smallwood in connection with a violent carjacking in Penticton.
B.C.’s civilian police watchdog, the Independent Investigations Office, later determined Smallwood had also shot himself.
On Tuesday, the inquest heard from Smallwood’s mother Sharon, who testified her son had gotten into street drugs after being prescribed a powerful opioid for a back injury.
“He would no longer come home because, we believe, he wanted to hide his addiction from us,” she told the inquest.
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She further testified that her son had intended to shoot his drug dealer, and that “if he was going to lose his life, he was going to take the drug dealer with him.”
The day before Woods’ death, police found a man with life-threatening gunshot wounds in a vehicle in Vernon.
Smallwood was later spotted in Penticton, where he allegedly carjacked a Pontiac Vibe, the same vehicle RCMP stopped getting off the ferry in Nanaimo.
Smallwood’s mother testified that he had told his girlfriend he would not go to jail and that “the police are going to have to shoot me, they are going to have to kill me.”
Coroners’ inquests are fact-finding exercises that cannot assign blame or determine legal responsibility.
The coroner’s jury, however, can make recommendations to prevent future deaths under similar circumstances.
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