Inquest shown final moments in fatal police shooting
After Jerrim Marshall Toms was shot in the chest, he turned and ran, moving quickly across an Auckland highway before collapsing in a ditch.
Police followed, their guns still trained on his fallen body.
Toms died in the early hours of March 31, 2018, after he was shot 12 times following a high-speed chase.
Footage from a police Eagle helicopter, shown at his inquest yesterday, shows the 29-year-old get out of his car and take confident strides towards a line of armed officers, two of them standing behind their open police car doors.
Both of Toms’ hands were down, one of them holding a machete.
The officer who fired the first shot told the inquest he believed Toms was going to kill or seriously hurt him.
“His silence and demeanour was saying, it’s either me or you,” said Officer A, whose identity is protected. “He had no expression on his face, just eyeballed me,” he said.
He fired at least two shots at Toms’ chest, as police are trained to do. Asked to explain why, he said aiming at the “centre mass” was “usually enough to stop a person in his tracks, prevent continuing action, and it’s harder to miss”.
Asked why he continued firing another three shots when Toms turned and ran, he said he thought he had missed.
“I believed he was still a threat so I shot two more as he ran.”
Police shot Toms 12 times in total, two bullets entering his chest at close range and each one fatal on their own, Coroner Debra Bell said when opening the inquest yesterday.
Officer A fired five shots and another officer, B, fired seven.
Toms had a machete and threatened police officers with it over the course of a high-speed police chase during which his car was spiked and stopped three times.
On the third stop, police opened fire at Toms, who died before emergency services arrived.
Phone records presented yesterday show Toms posted cryptic Facebook messages about love and eradicating people hours before he was shot.
He also sent messages about demons, Cain and Enoch to friends and family in previous days.
The inquest heard a recording of his mother Joan’s 111 call saying he was mentally ill, agitated, and had told her to get out of her house at 1.30am.
“He said, ‘I don’t want the likes of you in my house’,” she told the operator on the call.
CCTV footage taken at about 2.21am shows his white Subaru legacy driving into a petrol station.
Toms, dressed in a black T-shirt and shorts, got out of the car barefoot, filled the tank with erratic movements, and made threatening gestures in the direction of the station shop before leaving.
A representative of the Auckland DHB leadership told the inquest yesterday he did not believe having a clinician attend Toms’ incident with police would have helped.
“Mental health clinicians are not first responders,” said Dr John Paul Jacques, referring to well-established ways in which police could call on them for assessments, usually in a custody unit or hospital.
“In a case where someone is armed and there is imminent risk, it’s simply not safe for a mental health clinician to be there,” he said.
Toms suffered from bipolar disorder and was discharged from an Auckland mental health unit less than a month before his death.
A medical professional who saw Toms weeks before the shooting said he seemed well and was a “bright, honest, kind, and gentle man” who was excited about life and the impending birth of his daughter. She was born a few days after his death.