From outside her family’s Victoria home, Marney Mutch heard a terrifying gunshot blast and was hustled by police into the back of a squad car to wait. As she sat alone in the vehicle, her worst fears were confirmed over the police radio: Her 20-year-old son had been shot, likely fatally.

“Subject down. Bullet to the neck. Mother safely in the car,” the emotional mother recalls hearing.

article continues below

The last time she saw her son Rhett, she said, he had been sitting quietly on the couch of her Victoria home with tears in his eyes. Earlier that day, last Nov. 1, he had broken a window, after losing his key and thinking that his mother was not home.

Police released few details after the shooting, but said the mother called 911 after her son allegedly threatened to hurt himself.

There were issues Rhett was upset about that day, she said, adding she later learned he had been fired from his job the night before.

The fatal shooting of her only child is being examined by the province’s Independent Investigations Office, so Mutch declined to discuss the specifics of what happened until the report is complete. But she is certain that Rhett was not a threat to her or to himself, and was mortified when heavily armed officers responded to her 911 call with sirens blaring.

“I was on my way to sit down with him when the SWAT team arrived and I tried to assure them before they entered that the assault rifle was not needed ... I will forever be haunted by thoughts of how terrified he must have been,” Mutch said in a recent interview.

“If they think someone is distraught enough to consider harming themself, how does confronting them with terrifying weapons improve their outlook? This wasn’t a hostage-taking. The whole thing was surreal.”

Neither Victoria police nor the IIO will discuss specifics of what happened that day until the probe is finished.

Rhett was one of six people shot and killed by police in B.C. in 2014. All of the deceased either had diagnosed mental illnesses or were going through a mental health crisis triggered by drug use or difficult life events.

Last year was unusually active for fatal police shootings in this province. And it comes at a time when nearly every officer in B.C. has completed new training on how to de-escalate situations with mentally distraught people, before resorting to lethal force.

The Vancouver Sun was unable to find a complete list of fatal shootings by police in B.C., so compiled one using coroner’s reports, newspaper archives and IIO press releases.

The newspaper tallied 41 people killed in police shootings in this province since 2004, an average of just under four a year. Of those, we conservatively estimate 60 per cent of the deceased were going through a mental health crisis.

(The list does not include people who died after being Tasered by police, or those who died in police custody of other means.)

Some years, such as 2004, 2009 and 2014, had more fatal shootings than average, while other years, such as 2005, 2006, 2008 and 2013, had fewer.

In 2012, the province introduced mandatory “crisis intervention and de-escalation” training to help officers in B.C. better relate to people in the throes of a mental health crisis. The training was created in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski, the unarmed Polish man who became agitated at the Vancouver airport and was Tasered several times by RCMP in 2007.

