‘We just want answers’
Family of man shot by police say they have not been told a thing by the authorities
By the time she got there, an ambulance was outside her brother’s home and Lisa Greening was told by police to leave.
She went further down the road to wait. Before long, she saw the ambulance leaving with its emergency lights flashing.
The family of Jorden Mckay wants to know what happened to him.
Greening is the sister of the 27-year-old man who was fatally shot by a Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officer at his apartment on Carriage Lane in Corner Brook late Tuesday night.
She says she called him Tuesday night to let him know the police were looking for him.
On Monday, the RNC filed new charges against Mckay, who has a lengthy criminal record. Those charges included allegations of contacting and assaulting a woman Mckay was bound by court order not to communicate with.
He was set to go to trial in January for allegedly assaulting the same woman last April, charges to which he entered not guilty pleas in June.
Greening had agreed to act as his surety, an agreement to be responsible for an accused person adhering to orders of the court.
She said her phone indicated she was speaking with Mckay, who had told her he was home, at 11:32 p.m. Tuesday night. That’s about the same time the RNC says it responded to a criminal complaint that led to the shooting.
Greening said she was talking on the phone to him while police were at Mckay’s home to arrest her brother.
Greening described her brother as being relatively calm as he questioned the police about the latest allegations against him before her conversation with him ended. She recalled him asking the police if he could eat the food he was preparing before they took him away.
She said she heard him asking the police why they were handcuffing him.
Greening immediately left her home on the city’s east side to go to her brother’s to make sure his place was secured after he had left with the police.
That’s when she encountered the scene involving an ambulance.
She and other family members
went to Western Memorial Regional Hospital to see what they could find out about Mckay. After waiting for some time, they were taken to a private room by two officers and medical staff and informed he had died at 12:35 a.m.
“We asked them how he died, but they wouldn’t tell us and told us there would be an investigation,” said Greening.
She said the family was floored to learn from local news outlets a few hours later that a man had been fatally shot on Carriage Lane.
The RNC’S news release was issued at 6:47 a.m., a little more than three hours after Greening said she and her family members left the hospital in a state of shock.
Greening, in an interview with The Western Star at around 4:30 p.m. Wednesday, said the police had still not told them Mckay had been shot, let alone why.
“We just want answers,” she said. “We still don’t know anything.”
Greening said her brother may have had his problems, but he was a good person.
“He really wanted to change things in his life,” she said. “He would often thank me for helping him get a second chance (by acting as his surety).”
Jorden Mckay was the father of two children, a boy and a girl. Greening said he had just applied to a program to earn his high school diploma.
Broken calm
The morning after the relative tranquility of Carriage Lane was rocked by news of a fatal police shooting, it was Patricia Park’s anger that shattered the hush.
As a lone Royal Newfoundland Constabulary officer sat in a cruiser in the driveway of the home where a fellow officer killed the man the night before, Park pulled up in her car
to voice her upset at Mckay’s death.
Park said Jorden Mckay was a friend of her son’s.
Details of what transpired at around 11:30 p.m. the night before were scant, but Park was already blaming the police for what she felt was the needless death of a young man.
“No one will ever know what went wrong because these guys hide so much and no one sees it,” she said of the police. “Then, when someone loses their shit like I’m losing mine today, I’m the crazy one. I’m the one who needs the help because I’m speaking the truth and nothing but the truth.”
Park’s distrust of the justice system wasn’t helped by the fact her sister is Veronica Park, who died while incarcerated in a Nova Scotia prison in April 2015. Her family has claimed the Nova Institution for Women did not provide Veronica Park with adequate medical care before she died of complications from pneumonia, though the institution itself has said proper care was provided.
Park said she knew Mckay since he was a boy and, even though he was no stranger to getting into trouble, she described him as a nice person.
“Like most young men, sometimes you get off to a wrong start in life, but you never give up hope,” she said. “My sister was an addict and she was 38 years old, but I always seen a light for my sister.”
Park said this incident is really bothering her because she knows it’s having a big impact on her son. She said the news of the death of her son’s buddy Mckay is extra difficult to deal with a month away from Christmas.
“This really scares me,” she said. “If my son needed help, I would be scared to call the police. Obviously, I would think they would shoot him.
“They wouldn’t use pepper spray to try and calm him down and take him into custody. They would just shoot him and get it over with. They don’t give two shits what the family feels after the fact.”
Incident drew little attention from neighbours
Carriage Lane is a quiet subdivision of mostly young families. The Western Star spoke with some of the neighbours on the street Wednesday morning. Most declined to do an interview, but none of the people approached by the Western Star had heard a thing about what had transpired the night before.
Neil Fortune, who lives across the street and a couple of houses down, said he was up until around 12:30 a.m., but had no idea there was an incident so close to home until the following morning.
“It’s unsettling to think a situation like this would happen in a family neighborhood like ours,” said Fortune.
Fortune said he didn’t know who was living in the apartment of the home police had cordoned off with caution tape. He did say there had been police cars in that area fairly recently, but did not know if they had been at that particular residence.
Another neighbour across the street from the shooting who declined to give her name said she didn’t hear anything Tuesday night either. She didn’t know who lived there and had never noticed any concerning incidents previously.
A man whose backyard faces the rear area of the home where the shooting happened said he also didn’t find out there was an incident, let alone a serious one, until hearing about it on the news Wednesday morning.