A man holed up in an Oshawa funeral home Wednesday apparently drove a hearse through the building’s garage door and was then shot by police.

The Special Investigations Unit, the provincial police watchdog, has taken over the investigation.

Durham Region police were “investigating” the man at around 1:20 a.m., near King St. E. and Charles St., the SIU said in a news release on Wednesday.

The man entered the McIntosh-Anderson-Kellam Funeral Home in Oshawa and officers positioned themselves outside the building.

An hour later, it appears that the man drove a silver hearse through the garage door of the funeral home and tried to escape waiting police.

As the hearse crossed the home’s parking lot onto Bond St. E., police fired at the driver.

He mounted a curb and crashed into a concrete barrier in front of the Durham Regional Courthouse.

The SIU said that the man suffered non-life-threatening injuries and was sent to hospital.

Six SIU investigators and five forensic investigators probed the incident on Wednesday.

They placed more than 60 evidence pylons, marking a piece of the garage door stuck to the hearse, three gunshots to its windshield and blood on its driver side door. Abandoned police cruisers lined the route taken by the hearse.

The hearse came to rest on the sidewalk, and a grey cube van was blocking it in from behind. Near the van, a shotgun was on the road, marked as evidence.

Owners of the funeral home and representatives of the SIU could not be reached for comment on Wednesday.

Diana Holditch, who lives in a house that looks onto Bond St. E., and the courthouse, had just finished walking her two small dogs before the incident.

Holditch and her roommate, Mickey Yetman, ushered the dogs back into their home and parted ways for separate rooms.

Holditch, 51, decided to watch TV on the main floor and fell asleep shortly after 1:15 a.m.; then, three loud “pops” woke her up. “I heard maybe three,” said Holditch, who scrambled to look out her window.

She saw rushing cop cars and a flood of flashing lights: “It was just chaos and it was frightening.”

Yetman, 50, had gone upstairs to his bedroom and said he slept through the gunshots, but awoke to the “big bang” of the crashing hearse.

Durham police would not comment on the incident as it is now an SIU investigation.

The SIU is a third-party investigator that is called whenever police are involved in incidents that lead to a serious injury or death.

Anyone with information about the shooting is asked to contact the lead investigator at 416-622-1886 or 1-800-787-8529, ext. 1886.

With files from Dylan C. Robertson and Alex Nino Gheciu