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Man Shot Dead by Vancouver Police Identified & Potential Footage
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by Blaine Metzgar | March 23, 2009 at 01:29 pm
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The X-acto knife wielding homeless man shot by Vancouver police on March 20 has been identified. The victim was Michael Vann Hubbard, a 58 year old man with no fixed address and a suspect of a vehicle break-in on the 700 block of Granville Street . Vann Hubbard was shot and killed at the 500 block of Homer Street after he refused to drop the small blade and continued to advance on two officers.
An autopsy showed that he died of a single gun shot, according to police.
The choice to use lethal force in taking down Vann Hubbard has been a controversial issue and was addressed in a statement by Chief Constable Jim Chu,
A police involved shooting is a decision to use deadly force. This decision is usually made in seconds, under difficult and dangerous circumstances. But this decision is never made lightly. Our officers are trained to use deadly force only when it is necessary to protect themselves or others from grievous bodily harm or death, and no less violent options are available.
police confirmed that the two officers involved in the shooting were not armed with tasers.
A witness of the incident, Adam Smolcic, claimed he captured a video of the fatal shooting on his cell phone and believes that a police officer on the scene erased it. Smolcic, 25, is a marijuana activist who prints T-shirts for a living.
Smolcic said he was across the street when he saw the man slowly pull a knife from his backpack, and then one of the two officers on scene pulled out their gun and shot the man.
Smolcic said he did not see the man advance toward the officer before he was shot."No, absolutely not. He was very shaky, but he wasn't making any moves toward the police at all that I saw," he told CBC News.
Simolcic said he captured the enitre incident on his cell phone until a police officer approached him.
"He saw me filming and he came up to me and he asked to see my cellphone. He had my cellphone for a few minutes, and it appeared as though he was previewing the film. He gave me back my cellphone, probably about four or five minutes after he took it, told me to get lost, and of course, I did."
Simolcic plans to take the cell phone to a forensics expert in hopes of retreiving the footage.
Most RecentMost Recommended Comments (1)
at 14:03 on March 23rd, 2009
"Smolcic, 25, is a marijuana activist who prints T-shirts for a living."
- What does that have to do with it? -CBC trying to discredit him as a witness? Maybe they'll later say he was so high on pot and screen printing fumes that he couldn't count? ;)
They said Smolcic has gone to a data recovery company to try and pull the footage back, hope they can, usually pretty easy especially if its stored on an SD card.