Witnesses sought in fatal clash
A year after man‘s death, police say he might have talked to people in cars
Just days before the first anniversary of a Sechelt businessman’s death in an altercation with Vancouver police, investigators say new information has prompted a call for witnesses to come forward.
That information indicates that 33-year-old Myles Gray might have tried to talk with occupants of passing vehicles in the 8300-block Joffre Avenue near Marine Drive sometime between 3 and 4:30 p.m. on Thursday, Aug. 13, 2015, according to a statement released Tuesday by the Independent Investigations Office.
Gray’s mother, Margie, who has planning a family-and-friends vigil for her son this Saturday in Sechelt, said she wondered why the call for witnesses has taken so long.
“A year later, people leave the province, people move on,” Margie Gray said Tuesday.
“To seek witnesses one year later — they should have done this 10 months ago.”
Myles Gray owned a company that distributed wholesale floral greenery, and was working on deliveries the day he died.
Vancouver police responded to a complaint of “a distraught man causing a disturbance,” cops said afterward.
There was a foot chase of a couple of blocks, pepper spray was used, and Gray died that afternoon in the backyard of a house on Joffre Avenue, just east of Boundary Road, in Burnaby.
He had been pursued there from the 3600-block South East Marine Drive in Vancouver by as many as six Vancouver police officers.
Gray’s mother said her initial understanding was that the first complaint came earlier that afternoon, and that a call for an ambulance following the altercation came in at about 3:45 p.m.
“Between three and four, he was being pursued by police then,” Margie Gray said.
“He was distraught, possibly because he was being pursued by police. He was probably asking, pleading, begging for help.”
Her son had no criminal record or history of mental illness. On the morning he died, he seemed happy, a co-worker later told his mother.
The IIO statement asked that witnesses, or anyone who knows of potential witnesses who might have been driving in the area at the time, call the investigations’ witness line at 1-855-446-8477.