Emotions ran high at the Prince George courthouse Friday when friends and family of Dale Culver learned that two RCMP officers no longer stand accused of manslaughter in the man's 2017 death.
The news was greeted with audible gasps and verbal outbursts by some of the roughly 60 people who gathered in the courtroom.
The two accused, Cst. Paul Ste-Marie and Cst. Jean Francois Monette, took in the hearing via video conference.
"How do you sleep at night knowing that you killed somebody's child?" said one onlooker as the session neared the end.
With both Crown and defence lawyers looking on, Culver's now 22-year-old daughter, Lily Speed-Namox, stood up and angrily echoed the comment.
"It must be nice that they get to go home to their families every day, isn't it? That they get to go home to see their sons and their daughters and their mothers and their cousins and their friends - it must be nice," she said.
Crown counsel Joe Saunier told the court it came down to the prosecution's inability to prove cause of death. The case against the two relied heavily on a pathologist's finding that Culver suffered blunt force trauma.
But as the Crown was preparing for a preliminary inquiry prosecution it "started to have concerns and questions about the autopsy report."
The inquiry was put on hold and the matter was referred to an out-of-province pathologist who found that Culver "died from the acute and chronic adverse effects of methamphetamine following a struggle and that the mechanism of death was a sudden cardiac arrhythmic death."
"As I interpret that, Dale Culver had an enlarged and weakened heart from long-term methamphetamine use. He had used methamphetamine on July 18th, 2017...he essentially had a heart attack following the struggle with police," Saunier said.
"The pathologist did find, first, that this altercation exacerbated that condition but that altercation was not itself fatal. There were no fatal injuries sustained. Mr. Culver collapsed and died at the scene half an hour after the altercation ended."
Speaking to local media outside the courthouse, Speed-Namox disagreed with the prosecution's decision to drop the charges.
"The fact is whether my dad had a heart condition or not, what caused the heart attack was those RCMP officers and I stand by that statement...without that given interaction that night, he would still be here today," she said.
Culver, an Indigenous man from the Gitxsan and Wet'suwet'en Nations, had been arrested after police were called to a complaint that someone had been casing vehicles parked at the 10th Avenue Liquor Store. Culver was seen riding his bike and, according to the prosecution service's outline of the evidence when officers tried to stop him, and a "wrestling match ensued."
Even before the matter had reached the charge approval stage, concerns had been raised about the first pathologist's finding.
Prior to referring the case to Crown counsel B.C.'s civilian-based police watchdog, the Independent Investigations Office, referred the finding to a three-person panel, which included the first pathologist, and upheld the original conclusion.
Lawyer Ravi Hira, who represented Ste-Marie, said it took "great courage" by the Crown to seek yet another opinion and noted that Ontario's chief forensic pathologist was enlisted. The outcome, he said, was that what the first pathologist thought was the cause of Culver's death was actually the result of his death.
"They also concluded that there was no brain injury, they concluded that the cause of death was methamphetamine poisoning and the method of death was heart attack," Hira told the court.
Monette's lawyer, David Butcher, noted it took seven years to reach the outcome.
"These things have to be done better and they have to be done quicker because everyone suffers as a result of this," Butcher said.
At the conclusion of the proceeding, provincial court judge Paul Dohm said Culver died in "sad and tragic circumstances," and that he understands there is a "desire in some for someone to be held accountable."
"This decision will likely not be popular with some people, but popularity does not factor into the application of the charge approval standard. Rather the standard requires assessing the available evidence not with compassion, biases, or a misguided desire for a conviction but rather on principles of fairness, reasonableness and justice," Dohm said.
A charge of attempting to obstruct justice against three other officers - Cst. Arthur Dalman, Cst. Clarence (Alex) Alexander MacDonald, and Sgt. Bayani (Jon) Eusebio Cruz - in relation to the incident remains outstanding.
An 18-day trial on the matter is scheduled to begin May 13.
