Friend identifies police-involved shooting victim as Sixties Scoop survivor

A friend of 57-year-old Jason West told CTV News it was he who died after a police-involved shooting in Windsor on Friday.

Steven Mull, a local Indigenous shaman, was at the scene near Goyeau and Elliott Street East in the aftermath of the incident.

It was there that he told CTV News he knew the man killed—and knew he had been struggling with his mental health.

“He was just a really good guy,” said Mull. “I’ve never heard anything bad about him. It’s just, lately, anger.”

Ontario’s police watchdog, the Special Investigations Unit (SIU), has taken over the investigation and has not officially released the identity of the man killed, only his age.

Mull said West was a survivor of the Sixties Scoop, a period during which Indigenous children were forcibly removed from their families.

He said that trauma stayed with him all his life—and followed him to that downtown intersection on Friday morning.

“I believe today we all suffer from intergenerational trauma,” said Mull.

“I think, as people, you don’t see what we’ve gone through. So you wouldn’t know.”

NEW DETAILS

Staff at the Downtown Mission revealed that the incident began before a 911 call reported a man at the Food Basics grocery store armed with a knife.

Executive Director Rukshini Ponniah-Goulin said in a statement that a stabbing had occurred behind the former Windsor Library building on Ouellette Avenue.

“Mission staff went across the street, I believe, to assist police with the stabbing incident,” she wrote.

The scene of the shooting, as seen on September 9, 2024 (Travis Fortnum/CTV News Windsor)

She said staff heard gunshots not long after.

New information from the SIU indicates two knives were involved, and two officers fired their guns.

SIU spokesperson Kristy Denette said the post-mortem was conducted on Sunday, though those details will not be made public.

Six individuals have been invited for interviews as part of the SIU’s investigation, including four witnesses and two “subject officials.”

The SIU defines subject officials as “an official whose conduct, in the Director’s opinion, may have caused the death, serious injury, firearm discharge, or alleged sexual assault under investigation.”

The two subject officials are both Windsor police officers.

OFFICERS ON THE MEND

At least one officer sustained what a Windsor Police Service (WPS) spokesperson described as a “minor cut.”

Sergeant Kent Rice, president of the Windsor Police Association, said he had spoken to both involved.

“I’ve been in contact with all the officers affected, and, as of now, I can say that they appear to be handling themselves well,” he said.

Rice said WPS offers counselling and other services to officers involved in potentially traumatic incidents but noted that trauma may not manifest until much later.

“This is a tragedy,” he said.

The scene of the shooting, as seen on September 9, 2024 (Travis Fortnum/CTV News Windsor)

“I don’t have an officer at Windsor Police Service who comes to work and wants to be in this situation.”

It was trauma, Mull theorized, that led his friend to the dark place he found himself in on Friday morning.

He said West was a good man who liked cats and loved his pet fish.

Mull said West had wanted desperately to reconnect with his son, but he doesn’t believe he was able to.

“He was in a bad place,” said Mull, “but he was a good man.”