Michael MacIsaac’s blue-green eyes are open. Blinking up at the cloudy December sky, his chest rises and falls in a rhythm afforded those who are living.

But MacIsaac is dying.

His naked body is partially covered with a plastic yellow sheet as he lies in the middle of an empty suburban street where police have just shot him.

The 47-year-old man struggles as his lungs fill with air and collapse again. The officers pin his muscular arms to the ground.

For those still tucked away on a Monday morning in their modern brick homes in this quiet neighbourhood in north Ajax, the sound of bullets leaving their chamber barely registered across frost-covered lawns. Dogs barked. Some residents peered out front windows. Others continued with their morning routines.

Around the corner, 100 metres away, MacIsaac’s wife of five years didn’t hear the shots. She didn’t see police unroll their yellow tape.

MacIsaac’s face, neck, arms, chest, stomach and legs are covered in blood. In the mess of red are two small holes, each a centimetre round. The paramedics, now on scene, find one where a bullet pierced his upper abdomen.

The second hole is right above his heart.

In the weeks after MacIsaac was shot and killed by a Durham police officer on Dec. 2, 2013, the press and public knew him only as the “naked man.”

Eventually, we would come to know his name. And this story will, for the first time, lay out in detail what can be pieced together about his life, his heartbroken family, and how he ended up on the street that fateful morning.

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MacIsaac’s family now faces the kind of grief that is unrelenting as they endure inquests and internal reviews that could span years.

Many questions remain. Durham police said they are prohibited from talking about an open investigation, leaving much of their side of the story unanswered. Some questions may never be answered.

More than anything, MacIsaac’s family would like to know why he was shot.

This account is derived from hours of interviews with immediate family members and eyewitnesses, a review of internal documents, including ambulance reports and audio recordings of events shortly after the shooting.

MacIsaac’s death comes at a time when public scrutiny of police shootings is high, due largely to another much-publicized incident, the death of 18-year-old Sammy Yatim on a downtown Toronto streetcar captured on video last summer. Const. James Forcillo has been charged with second-degree murder in that case and is awaiting trial.

Since Yatim, there have been 10 other police-involved shootings in the province and three, including MacIsaac’s, have been fatal.

In February, a coroner’s inquest classified three Toronto police shooting deaths as homicides — a determination that doesn’t attach criminal guilt, but concludes the officers were responsible for the deaths. The jury recommended more than 70 changes, many of which were meant to improve police responses to people in crisis. But history shows many will likely never be adopted.

Everyone involved tells the story a little differently. Studies show those who witness or experience tragic events can have differing, even contradictory, memories. As much as possible, the Star has tried to corroborate accounts from multiple people, focusing on the parts they personally witnessed.

MacIsaac grew up in the lush green expanse of Codroy Valley on the southwestern tip of Newfoundland. The family farm was so sprawling even a brood of six wander-lusting children — five girls and one boy — never explored all its corners.

From the time MacIsaac was a child, born to devout Catholic parents on May 7, 1966, he would get down on both knees every night to pray.

His was not an easy upbringing. The scrawny boy with parted auburn hair and toothpick arms was bullied mercilessly. One schoolyard incident would change his life forever.

When MacIsaac was in Grade 3, his family said, a pair of boys several years older grabbed him by his ankles and spun him around before letting go, as if tossing him into a trash pile.

MacIsaac’s head cracked against the side of a tree. When he stood up to escape his tormentors, he came crashing down again, smashing his head on rocks on the ground. The second time he wouldn’t get up.

The school nurse drove him, unconscious, 30 minutes back to the farm where she plopped the tiny boy into his mother’s arms. Then it was another 40 minutes in a taxi along a winding highway to a clinic.

MacIsaac gained consciousness just before arriving and began to vomit. He was examined and found to have no external damage after being kept overnight. MacIsaac and his mother were sent home.

In college, years later, while working laying brick, MacIsaac started to get pins and needles in his arms. Another time while walking, he just collapsed. A few months later it would happen again. After seeing neurology experts in St. John’s, an MRI revealed scar tissue on his brain. He was diagnosed with temporal lobe epilepsy — the collapses believed to be brought on by seizures.

The day before he died, Sunday, Dec. 1, MacIsaac didn’t look well. He was running a fever, had no appetite and was dazed.

Then he had a typical seizure, the kind where his arm would twist in on itself, departing from the logical alignment of the rest of his body as he tried to hold on to it with his cooperative arm, said his wife, Marianne MacIsaac.

In the moments between seizure and lucidity, he wouldn’t always make sense, but would often become overtly spiritual. “God has a plan for me,” he would say.

On Sunday, his wife gave MacIsaac his medication — two common anti-convulsive pills taken three times a day — and Tylenol for his fever. The medication never eliminated all seizures, but he took it diligently. That afternoon his wife tucked MacIsaac into bed, building cushiony walls around him so he wouldn’t fall and hit his head off a nearby dresser.

The next morning, Dec. 2, his wife, who works as a travel agent, was on the phone with a client upstairs. MacIsaac called in sick to work and was resting in the nearby bedroom.

Just before 10 a.m., MacIsaac appeared in the hallway naked, having stripped off his pajamas. He seemed delirious, speaking but not making sense. Startled, his wife, corralled him back in the bedroom as he made for the stairs.

Back in the bedroom, MacIsaac, agitated, kept pushing back as his wife tried to restrain him.

MacIsaac had never been violent before. He was mild-mannered, a big kid often found on the floor playing with his 10 nieces and nephews. This wasn’t like him.

At that moment, his sister-in-law, Violet Madjarian, arrived as usual to drop off her small dog and saw the commotion before MacIsaac knocked her as he blew past, down the stairs and out the door into the near-0-degree weather.

MacIsaac ran west when he left the house. He ran so fast, his wife couldn’t chase after him and had to stay with her elderly father. Where he went next is not clear, but after heading south he started drawing the attention of drivers and pedestrians. Several people called Durham police, who according to the SIU, noted “multiple disturbance calls regarding a man acting in a strange manner.”

Natasha Khan first saw MacIsaac walking south on Westney Rd., a major street just a block from his home.

“He was walking as though he was just normal,” Khan, a daycare supervisor at the Smart Start Learning Centre, located in a strip mall just off Westney Rd., told the Star in December. “Like he was fully clothed. He wasn’t shivering or anything. No shoes. Nothing.”

Durham-area resident Kristin Bennett was driving north on Westney Rd. when she spotted him — now one kilometre from his home — heading back in the direction he had just come from.

Further up Westney Rd. minutes later, Rubie Supnet had just got off the bus from school — a block from MacIsaac’s home — when she spotted him jogging towards her.

“I couldn’t help but notice the way he jogged. He would stop every few seconds, jog on the spot and look around,” she wrote the Star in December. “At one point he waved and I was (inclined) to help from afar but then as he got closer I realized he was naked.”

Not long after Khan first saw MacIsaac, another daycare employee came inside with a group of children and said the man was heading back their way, jogging across Williamson Dr. and up Dring St. — back toward home. Khan was on the phone with police when she saw him again, jogging with his hands covering his groin.

Bennett had also continued towards Dring St. and at one point, MacIsaac started approaching cars. He banged his fists on Bennett’s hood, yelling nonsensically for her to, “Turn it off” (Bennett, who is deaf, wears cochlear implants and is able to read lips.) He repeated it over and over before moving on. Bennett parked up Dring St. some 10 metres away.

Shelley Allen-Groves was returning to her Dring St. home after dropping her daughter off at daycare when she saw MacIsaac.

He started banging on the windows of another black truck on the street before it pulled away. As Allen-Groves pulled into her driveway, MacIsaac came toward the house. She wondered if he needed help and called 911. She was still on the phone when he started banging on the car window and swearing at her to open it.

She told the man she was on the phone — that help was coming. But it only seemed to make matters worse, she said. MacIsaac picked up a large rock from her nearby garden and walked toward the car. Allen-Groves backed out of the driveway and stopped a few houses away.

She and Bennett both saw the man disappear onto a front porch — which Allen-Groves later realized was her home. The man banged a small patio table off a side window, breaking off its wicker top.

Returning to the road, he was now carrying the wrought-iron leg like a baseball bat, as two police cruisers approached.

Three officers got out and lifted their guns from their holsters.

As MacIsaac stepped off the curb, one officer aimed and fired three times. (Bennett noted the movements of his hand, the gun and the sound of the shots. Others in the area remember hearing two to three shots.) MacIsaac never swung, Bennett said.

Bennett and Allen-Groves are the only witnesses to the shooting that the Star is aware of.

Rafah Alhalabi was in her main floor bathroom of her Dring St. home when she heard the first shot.

As she moved less than a metre to the door she heard a second shot. Looking through her front window, where she has a clear view past the end of her driveway, she saw MacIsaac still standing with both hands clutching his stomach.

She called for her husband, Atef Albaba, who was in the kitchen.

They watched as two uniformed officers, with their guns still pointed at MacIsaac, demand he get on the ground. MacIsaac complied — either by choice or because he had fallen there — lying face down on the asphalt, moaning in pain. The officers slowly unfolded the yellow blanket. The couple didn’t recognize MacIsaac, a neighbour they know because he would smile at their children when delivering papers to his house. The couple said they never saw anything in MacIsaac’s hands or at his feet.

Bennett said the officers kicked the rod from MacIsaac’s hands once he was lying in the street, before they handcuffed him.

“You will be OK. You will be OK,” Alhalabi heard one officer tell MacIsaac.

Allen-Groves said it all happened very quickly — a matter of minutes. “I really can’t judge the actions of the police,” she said. “I know I felt threatened.”

It’s not clear and the Star could not determine what happened to the table leg during the commotion.

When a third officer appeared in Alhalabi’s view, she said she heard him quietly tell the officer who fired his gun to leave.

“Go, go, go.”

It’s not clear if the officer left, or what was meant by telling him to leave.

Both Durham police and Durham EMS denied access to records following requests from the Star under the freedom-of-information law, citing an ongoing investigation.

But an ambulance report obtained by the Star breaks down their response minute by minute.

What is not clear is why the standardized form notes “Trauma Unknown” for the type of call. Did the officers at the scene not inform dispatch they had just shot someone?

“They didn’t know what they were going for,” said Troy Cheseboro, superintendent of professional standards for Durham EMS.

The notes the paramedics made after they arrived at the scene offer a glimpse into what police said happened. The officers told the paramedics they found MacIsaac on the street “yelling” and that he had “been aggressive with a metal pipe” after he had “been having unknown behavioral issues.”

Then they told the paramedics they’d shot him with a “40 glock” — a standard-issue firearm.

The two paramedics who arrived did not return requests for comment or said they could not talk about the incident.

The team that first arrived on scene were primary care paramedics, something the family has questioned since advanced care paramedics have additional skills — and an extra year of training.

“It’s a requirement of the Ministry of Health that the closest available ambulance be sent to a call,” Cheseboro explained.

But just one minute after the ambulance left with MacIsaac, a second ambulance with an advanced care crew arrived at his home to assess Madjarian, MacIsaac’s sister-in-law, for “Head/Brain Trauma.”

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Details on a second ambulance report say paramedics thought they were going to a “domestic situation.” His sister-in-law originally told police she had been hit in the head. It’s not clear who called that ambulance. The sister-in-law was marked as being unharmed.

At the home, MacIsaac’s wife was being held by police in a cruiser. When she saw police tape at the end of the street, she knew something was wrong. She was suddenly brought back into the house and another officer arrived. What she was told next had never crossed her mind. Her husband had been shot.

She remembers crumbling to the floor. In the haze, it was clear she needed to do one thing before being escorted to the hospital. She ran upstairs to pluck MacIsaac’s red rosary from his top drawer next to the bed.

When she finally reached him at Rouge Valley hospital, MacIsaac was sedated. Not sure he would be able to respond, his wife crouched next to him to whisper in his ear. “I’m here. Your sisters are coming.”

“I love you.”

Soon after arriving at Rouge Valley, MacIsaac was prepped to be flown to St. Michael’s Hospital by an ORNGE air ambulance helicopter.

MacIsaac died twice in the air, resuscitated each time by a new crew of paramedics, before he landed on the roof of the hospital.

His wife and sisters, Joanne and Eileen, met at St. Michael’s emergency bay as he landed overhead.

Coincidentally, reporters were gathered outside the hospital for news on the condition of another man, Toronto police Const. John Zivcic, who had been rushed there days earlier after an on-duty crash left him fatally injured.

Nurses taped MacIsaac’s red rosary to his hand as they wheeled him into surgery.

“He’s a fighter,” one nurse told his wife.

Minutes after arriving at the hospital, two men in suits arrived to interview the family.

At 2:15 p.m., Det. Jim Leipsig and Det. Rob Moore from Durham police — normally assigned to the homicide squad — began asking questions, something the family has concerns about.

While the Special Investigations Unit is legally mandated to be the lead investigator, what police are able to do during that investigation is not always clear in the law.

“Right now it’s only about you and Michael. All right? Because we want the best for everybody here. And we want to find the truth and that’s the whole reason we’re here,” one of the detectives said softly, heard on a recording MacIsaac’s family made of the conversation. Then the second detective started in on the line of questioning.

They asked about MacIsaac’s previous behaviour, his medication, his history with drugs and alcohol. They asked his wife to explain what happened at the house. At one point, when the family asked if they should have a lawyer present, one of the detectives told them there was no need to “spend money on an attorney.”

His family said in the chaos that afternoon they never realized the detectives were from the same force behind his shooting. And they had no idea when someone is injured by police, the SIU is provincially mandated to be the lead investigator — taking over control of any scene and interviewing witnesses.

Several minutes into the interview, there was an unexpected knock at the door.

“Hi guys, we’re with the SIU,” said a new investigator.

The detectives explained they got permission to come from their superior to get “information about the domestic.” There was some confusion as the investigator calls someone at his office to tell them two detectives are already in the room. For reasons that are not clear, the police interview with MacIsaac’s family continues.

The detectives told the family there are often two investigations that run “parallel” and they actually just want to know about what happened “prior to” the incident. “Everything that happened once Michael left the house, they’re going to investigate,” the detective said.

As they continued to wait at the hospital, his wife Marianne alleges more officers — three in uniform — showed up at their Unsworth Cres. home and gained entry without a warrant by intimidating the caregiver tending to her elderly father.

The officers searched the house from top to bottom, his wife said, photographing and sifting through personal belongings. The family now believes the police acted out of turn, fishing for information about MacIsaac as he was dying.

The SIU regulations don’t specifically prohibit police from investigating, but a 1998 report by Justice George Adams — which resulted in the current regulations — identified problems with police interference.

“There have been occasions when, by the time the SIU investigators arrived, civilian witnesses had been interviewed by the police and released,” Adams wrote. “Pending the arrival of the SIU, attending officers shall do all that is immediately necessary to preserve not only the integrity of the incident scene, but also the integrity of the investigation.”

SIU spokesperson Jasbir Brar said they could not address specific questions from the Star, as the case was still open. Brar said generally the SIU are lead investigators when their mandate is invoked.

“Where a police service has its own bona fide investigative interest, the SIU is willing to make arrangements with the police to allow them to conduct their own investigation, so long as their involvement does not undermine the SIU’s case and its independence,” Brar wrote in an email.

Durham police spokesperson Dave Selby said they could not respond because the SIU was the lead agency.

“I know it is frustrating for the family, for friends, for neighbours and for everyone else involved. However, full and frank disclosure is not permitted up front in incidents like these, and we are bound to respect the legislated process that’s in place,” Selby wrote in an email.

That first night Joanne MacIsaac knew her brother was dying.

Following MacIsaac’s first surgery, Dr. James Byrne visited the women closest to him to update them on his condition and explain what a bullet does to a body.

Byrne, whose careful and detailed update was captured in a recording the family made, explained that the first surgery was to find the source of bleeding and try to stop it — essentially “damage control.”

The bullets — designed to mushroom on impact — ripped through MacIsaac’s internal organs, injuring his liver, pancreas, small bowels and the major vein in the abdomen that carries blood from the lower part of the body back to the heart. There were no exit wounds.

His chance of survival was “small,” the doctor said.

The room was wracked by sobs and wails as that difficult calculation settled in.

In the early morning hours, all of MacIsaac’s family who had made it to the hospital gathered around his bed as medical staff prepared to take him off life support.

His wife pleaded with nurses, asking if there was any way to keep MacIsaac alive until his mother could make it to the hospital. She had been visiting one of her daughters in Minnesota. Her flight was due to land later that night. They were told it couldn’t wait.

Around 3:30 a.m. they called MacIsaac’s mother, sisters, nieces and nephews on four phones, put them on speaker and placed them on the pillow next to his head. As they stood around him, holding his hands, the hospital chaplain said a few words and led them in prayer.

Almost 2,000 kilometres away, his mother, who had carried her auburn-haired boy, limp, to the hospital when he was hurt all those years ago, listened to his last rites.

“I love you Michael, I love you Michael,” she cried over and over into his ear. “Oh God, please take him.”

It took 45 minutes for him to let go.

His sister Joanne now travels with a black portfolio stuffed with notes, maps, and folders full of research on hollow-point bullets, the police and epilepsy. They have already been to see Ontario ombudsman André Marin, staff from Premier Kathleen Wynne’s office and other officials.

She wonders why the bullets that do so much damage are standard issue in Ontario.

His family would like to see better recruitment and training for officers who are taught by the Ontario Police College — as one former trainer earlier told the Star — to “shoot until the threat has stopped.”

There are other lingering questions: Why weren’t paramedics told they were being called to a shooting when every second counts? Why did Durham police interview family members at the hospital when any police shooting must be turned over to the Special Investigations Unit? And why, as MacIsaac’s wife claims, was their family home searched that day by Durham officers without a warrant?

“It’s changed everything I believe in,” his sister says now. “He needed to be protected that day.”

His family strongly believes his diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy — which arises from a part of the brain responsible for memory and behaviour — played a crucial role in what happened to him that day. An autopsy found no trace of drugs or alcohol in MacIsaac’s system, they say. Seizures cannot be detected after the fact, meaning it will never be certain what happened.

His wife has yet to wash MacIsaac’s last load of laundry. His drawers are undisturbed. The rosary returned home. They had plans to renovate their home and try again to have a baby.

She wants to know the name of the officer who fired the shots that killed her husband.

In the immediate aftermath and the months that have passed since, those who were bystanders to MacIsaac’s final moments have been asking some of the same questions.

In her home, neighbour Alhalabi cries softly as she remembers MacIsaac lying in the street, how she saw his hands move when the officers rolled him over and realized he was still alive.

“We don’t want this story to happen again for someone else,” her husband, Albaba, says. He knows police have a job to do, but this he doesn’t understand.

“Why they shoot this guy, naked?”

* * * * * *

TEMPORAL LOBE EPILEPSY

Temporal lobe epilepsy arises from the temporal lobes — sandwiched between the frontal lobe and the brainstem. That part of the brain controls memory and behaviour. Housed within the lobes is a very small part of the brain called the amygdala — sometimes known as the “rage centre.”

“People with problems with the amygdala can have problems with controlling their temper and things like that,” explained world-renowned Toronto neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Cusimano, who has no connection to MacIsaac’s case and could not speak to it, but is an expert in epilepsy and seizures.

Those with temporal lobe epilepsy don’t usually experience the kind of seizure most people are familiar with — where someone collapses and convulses.

Instead, they experience partial seizures — when the person is still awake while their brain is seizing. In those instances, the signs of seizure can vary. Some stare off into space, blink or do another motion repeatedly.

“They might actually even talk to you,” Cusimano said. “They may know that they’re responding but they may say weird things.”

Cusimano said although most people experience the same symptoms of seizure each time, illness, such as a fever, can aggravate symptoms.