Civilian witnesses wanted to help
Testimony describes moments before Michael MacIsaac’s death
Of the many members of the public who called 911the day they saw a naked Michael MacIsaac walk through the streets of Ajax in frigid temperatures, several expressed the same desire: simply to see this stranger get the help he needed.
“I just want to make sure you get home OK, buddy,” Ron Nino shouted to him from the driver’s seat of his pickup truck.
“I let him know that I’m on the phone with 911 and that, if he needs help, help is on the way,” Shelley Allen-Groves would later recall of the man who was banging on her car while she was inside.
The help Nino and Allen-Groves had in mind never materialized.
MacIsaac, 47, was shot dead by Durham police Const. Brian Taylor on Dec. 2, 2013. Ontario’s police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), said MacIsaac was advancing on police with a metal table leg.
Taylor was cleared of criminal wrongdoing.
At the third day of the coroner’s inquest into MacIsaac’s death on Wednesday, witnesses with various vantage points to the shooting offered their recollections to the inquest jury, in the hope of piecing together MacIsaac’s final moments before he was shot.
As the jury previously heard, MacIsaac’s family believes he had an epileptic seizure and left his home as his wife was unable to stop him.
With MacIsaac’s wife, mother, three of his sisters and brother-in-law watching, often emotionally, from the audience, Nino recounted his interactions on Wednesday with the naked man.
As coroner’s counsel Troy Harrison pointed out, Nino’s evidence was crucial to the jury, because he was one of the people who spent the most time with MacIsaac.
Nino, who was still on the phone with 911, was already on the scene when Taylor arrived.
Contrary to another witness who was watching from a house, who said that Taylor repeatedly said words to the effect of “Stop. Drop the weapon,” Nino testified that he only heard Taylor say something similar to “Drop it” once before proceeding to shoot MacIsaac twice in almost rapid succession.
MacIsaac, according to the SIU, had been heading down the steps and driveway of the home where he broke patio furniture and retrieved the table leg, although it’s unclear to Nino where he was standing when he was shot by Taylor because he was hidden by the police SUV.
Taylor, who is expected to testify Thursday, wrote in his notes that he repeatedly issued the “police challenge” to MacIsaac to stop and drop the weapon and that MacIsaac was screaming “Come on? Come on.”
None of this can be heard on Nino’s 911 call, where at one point he says, “Oh, god.”
“That was the gunshot,” Nino said Wednesday. He estimated the entire time between Taylor arriving on scene and the shots to be about 30 to 40 seconds. And even though MacIsaac had been banging on Nino’s car door before police arrived, he still would not drive off, for fear of running MacIsaac over. “I didn’t want to hurt him,” he said. The table leg MacIsaac eventually got a hold of came from a patio set at the home of Allen-Groves. She was returning home from dropping her daughter off at daycare when she saw MacIsaac having an “animated” discussion with Nino in his pickup truck, which was partially obstructing her driveway.
“He seemed angry, upset from his body language,” Allen-Groves testified Wednesday about MacIsaac.
By then, Allen-Groves was already on the phone with 911. She was able to get into her driveway, at which point MacIsaac started banging on her window.
“Open up!” MacIsaac can be heard yelling in the background of AllenGroves’ 911 call.
She said she was trying to tell him through the window that “help was on the way,” but she said when MacIsaac picked up a football-sized rock from her rock garden and headed back toward her car, Allen-Groves drove off and parked up the street. (She acknowledged that in her 911 call, she only said he picked the rock
“The naked man took the metal pole in his hand and started running toward the officer . . . I heard the officer tell him to ‘Stop, drop his weapon,’ multiple times.” RUELLA RODRIGUES WITNESS WHO TESTIFIED AT THE CORONER’S INQUEST INTO THE DEATH OF MICHAEL MACISAAC
up, not that he was coming towards her.)
Through her rearview mirror, she said she could see MacIsaac breaking off part of patio furniture from a house she later realized was her own and banging on her front door with it.
She said she couldn’t remember exactly when police arrived, but recalled MacIsaac holding the pole “like a baseball bat above his shoulder.” She testified he was advancing “fairly slowly” down the driveway toward officers.
“My recollection is he lurched forward” after the first shot, she said. The second shot was within seconds.
She said, because her car windows were up, she did not recall if the officers shouted commands at MacIsaac before he was shot.
Ruella Rodrigues was getting ready for school when she heard yelling and banging outside. She went to her grandparents’ bedroom window to see a naked man banging on the window of a black truck (driven by Nino).
She said she witnessed, from the second-floor bedroom window, MacIsaac approach at least two other vehicles. In all instances, she said he was telling the drivers to put down their windows, only for them to drive off.
He eventually made his way up to the front porch of a neighbour’s home, where Rodrigues said MacIsaac broke off a table leg from the patio furniture.
The black truck she initially saw had returned by then, and was honking and pointing at the police, who had just arrived on scene, Rodrigues said.
“The naked man took the metal pole in his hand and started running toward the officer,” who had just exited his vehicle, Rodrigues said.
“I heard the officer tell him to ‘Stop, drop his weapon,’ multiple times.”
Rodrigues said the officer shot MacIsaac once he made it to the curb with the metal pipe, but that MacIsaac continued to “run” with the pole, and so Taylor shot him again.
“It was pretty close,” Rodrigues said of the distance between Taylor and MacIsaac when he was shot, estimating at between three to four feet, although she told the SIU it was about seven feet.
The inquest continues Thursday with testimony from another civilian witness and then Taylor.