N.D.G. man killed by police was nice man, loving dad, friend says

The family of Nicholas Gibbs, the 23-year-old gunned down last Thursday by police after reportedly threatening officers with a knife, says he was a loving father whose death has devastated his loved ones.

A GoFundMe campaign has been launched to raise $15,000 for funeral expenses and to help his common-law wife and her four children, all under age seven, move to a different home, since she does not feel comfortable living near the Notre-Dame-de-Grâce location where Gibbs was shot.

“He was always 100 per cent there for his kids,” Laura Ashley Buxton-Heaton, the girlfriend of Gibbs’s brother, Shawn Harewood, said Sunday.

“Every time I would see him in N.D.G., he was with his kids.”

Quebec’s police watchdog, the Bureau of Independent Inquiry (BEI), is investigating the fatal shooting.

Montreal police were called to the scene of a fight between two men at Montclair Avenue and de Maisonneuve Boulevard on Thursday at about 8:15 p.m.

According to police, when officers arrived, Gibbs — one of the men in the fight — turned on officers with a knife. Police say the officers tried unsuccessfully to subdue him with a Taser before using their sidearms.

Witnesses said they heard a man shouting: “Shoot me!” two or three minutes before the shots were fired.

Gibbs was transported to hospi- tal, where he died.

Police described Gibbs as a man known to police with an extensive criminal record.

On June 30, he pleaded guilty to assault with intent to resist arrest. He was also facing charges of fraud and forgery and was scheduled to appear in court on Oct. 16.

But Buxton-Heaton said there was a softer side to Gibbs, who had been with his now commonlaw wife for 10 years, and was the devoted father of three of her children.

“He was a humble guy,” she said. True, Gibbs was a troubled young man with a long history of involvement with the justice system, she said.

But she described Gibbs, whose repeated problems with the law dated back to his youth, as “the product of his surroundings.”

“He had his own demons that he was struggling with, but he was a very nice guy,” she said.

The GoFundMe appeal describes Gibbs as a quiet, reserved man who had been bullied as a child. “Mental illness played a huge part of this situation,” says the appeal, suggesting that police should have tackled and subdued Gibbs rather than shooting to kill.

“There are still a lot of unanswered questions and the family is taking this step by step,” it says.

Gibbs’s partner cannot afford a funeral and also needs money to buy school supplies for the two older children, it adds.

Buxton-Heaton said the family is discussing whether to pursue legal action against police, but is waiting for the BEI report before making a decision.

Even though Gibbs was a large man and was wielding a knife, police should have been able to disarm him without using lethal force, she said. “He didn’t have a gun.”