B.C. woman fatally shot by police in New Brunswick
A 26-year-old B.C. woman is dead after being shot by police in New Brunswick early Thursday morning.
Family members in Tofino have identified the woman as Chantel Moore, an Indigenous woman and mother of a five-year-old girl who had moved to New Brunswick from Port Alberni just a few months ago.
Police in Edmundston, N.B., say it was around 2:30 a.m. when officers received a request to check on Moore’s well-being at an apartment building on Canada Road in Edmundston.
Police say she was holding a knife and threatening the officers.
“At first, the officer went on scene, and all of a sudden the person just exited the apartment with a knife and was attacking the officer,” Edmundston Police Force Insp. Steve Robinson told CBC News on Thursday. “He had no choice but to defend himself.”
Moore died at the apartment, according to police.
“I don’t believe this. They were going there to check on her, not kill her,” Grace Frank, Moore’s grandmother, said in a Facebook post. “Self-defence is what (the police officer) says and she’s not here to defend herself. I don’t believe.”
Nora Martin, Moore’s aunt, described her great-niece as a “kind, gentle and loving” person, and had trouble believing she would charge at an officer with a knife. “It’s very out of character. Chantel didn’t have a mean bone in her body,” said Martin, who works as a community health liaison with the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation.
Moore, who recently started working at a hotel, had just moved into her own place after living for some time at her mother’s home in Edmundston.
Martin says Moore’s boyfriend, who was in Toronto, had asked police to check on her because she complained to him that she was being harassed by someone.
Meanwhile, Robinson told reporters that Edmundston police officers don’t wear body cameras. An autopsy has been scheduled, and an investigation is continuing.
Martin says six members of her family are hoping to fly to New Brunswick on Friday to be with Moore’s mother and daughter.
The Edmundston police department has asked for an independent review of the incident, and New Brunswick RCMP will assist in the investigation as “a matter of accountability.”
Moore’s death comes amid protests against police violence in Canada and the United States.
The EIB, Quebec’s independent police watchdog, said late Thursday that it will investigate the shooting at the request of the RCMP.
On Thursday, Lydia Hwitsum, a spokesperson for the First Nations Summit Political Executive, called for a full, independent and impartial investigation into Moore’s death as soon as possible.
According to information obtained by the Globe and Mail in 2019, one-third of the people shot to death by RCMP officers over a 10-year period were from First Nations, despite Indigenous people only making up five per cent of the population.