Family seeks answers after international student fatally shot by Winnipeg police: lawyer
Global News
A family is searching for answers after a 19-year-old man was fatally shot by Winnipeg police on Sunday.
A family is searching for answers after a 19-year-old man was fatally shot by Winnipeg police on Sunday.
On New Year’s Eve, Winnipeg police were called to an apartment building on University Crescent for a report of an armed man who was acting erratically.
Officers say they were confronted by an armed man at the suite and that during the encounter, an officer shot him. The man was taken to hospital in critical condition and later died of his injuries.
Jean-René Dominique Kwilu, a lawyer for the family, has identified the man as 19-year-old Afolabi Stephen Opaso, an international student from Nigeria who was studying economics at the University of Manitoba.
He says the family is now looking for answers.
“Our concern, the family’s concern is how a call for a mental health crisis situation would end up in a death sentence with a loved one being shot dead,” Kwilu told Global News.
Kwilu says they believe Opaso was in the midst of a mental health crisis, and more adequate mental health resources should have been deployed.
“Those are the questions the family has. They’re just devastated, because they send their son here to study, and now he’s returning home in a coffin,” Kwilu said.