A social worker who witnessed a police-involved shooting that claimed the life of a Windsor man says "none of us expected that to happen that morning."
Rola Osman, who works for the Windsor-Essex Community Health Centre and Street Health, has testified on Day 3 of a coroner's inquest looking into the death of Matthew Mahoney.
On the morning on March 21, 2018, Osman was working with Windsor police Constable Andre Marentette to conduct outreach visits to locations and encampments where people with drug addictions, mental health issues or those facing homelessness tended to gather.
A call came over the police radio about a man with a butcher block full of knives and at the time, matched the description of a homeless man that the pair had spoken with earlier that morning.
Osman told the inquest that they decided to go talk to him but when they located the suspect at the intersection of Ouellette Avenue and Wyandotte Street, they realized it was not the man they had spoke with earlier. It was a man later identified as 33-year-old Matthew Mahoney, a disagnosed schizophrenic.
Osman told the inquest, she had seen the person around in the community before but had never had to deal or work with him.
"Normally he had a smile on his face but he did not look happy," Osman testified. "He had a demeanour about him that he could be a threat to the public and looked like he was on a mission, that he needed to be somewhere and was evading police."
Mahoney would wave off any attempts at communication by Constable Marentette and kept walking to the area of Dufferin Place, near Goyeau and Wyandotte.
As Constable Marentette and Osman arrived on the scene in their cruiser, other officers were already there attempting to make contact with Mahoney.
Osman told the inquest, "I saw Officer (John Paul) Karam and he was trying to make contact. As soon as they talked, in seconds, the individual took out a knife and went at him, slashing at him."
Constable Karam would fall back after hitting a curb as he tried to avoid the knife, falling to the ground behind a telephone pole and against a wall.
"My view, I had the pole and the wall, I could see the man bent down and just stabbing," Osman said. "I could see him (Karam) trying to defend himself with his hands but I couldn't tell if the man was making contact with the knife. I honestly thought he had died or was severely injured because of the way Mahoney was stabbing at him."
Osman testified that as soon as Constable Marentette stopped the cruiser, he stepped out and shot the man.
She detailed how Mahoney turned toward Constable Marentette after the first shot and it looked like he got angry, charging at him with the knife, before he was shot several more times and eventually fell down.
Osman, who was seated in the front passenger seat of the cruiser, told the inquest that she had had to scoot up in her seat to see if he had fallen down on the ground because he got pretty close to the cruiser.
She got out of the cruiser to go check on Constable Karam, saying " I believe he had died, that he had been stabbed to death."
She couldn't tell where he had been stabbed but there was blood all over him and puncture wounds on the front of his police-issued ballistic vest.
She told the inquest there was blood pouring from his hands, so she grabbed a kit that she carried with her that had gauze in it to close his wounds until EMS arrived.
When later questioned about how she knew Mahoney, Osman explained that she knew he accessed the harm reduction supply that her organization had but the she wasn't involved in giving any to him.
She also said she knew he hung around people who abused crystal meth and assumed he was using it because he was accessing the harm reduction supply.
On March 21, 2018, Matthew Mahoney was shot and killed following a confrontation with police in the Dufferin Place alley, behind the McDonalds at Goyeau Street and Wyandotte Street.
Officers had been called for a report of a man carrying a butcher block with knives. Police asked him to stop but he attacked the officers instead. Police tasered the man, but it didn't stop him and then shots were fired.
Ontario's Special Investigations Unit cleared police of any wrongdoing in the case, concluding the shots that were fired by the officers, which struck and killed Mahoney, 'were justified'.