Inquest underway into mentally ill man shot dead by police

A mentally ill 29-year-old fatally shot by police, including eight shots as he fled, was a “brilliant, authentic and honest” man, whose condition deteriorated with methamphetamine use, a coroner’s inquest heard today.

By Guyon Espiner for rnz.co.nz

Jerrim Toms was shot dead by police after a 40-minute chase that ended at 4 a.m. on a deserted road near Puhoi, north of Auckland, on March 31, 2018.

Toms got out of his car, which had been hit three times by police spikes, and walked toward two officers holding a machete.

The officers fired four shots as Toms walked towards them and eight more as he fled.

An inquest into his death was opened today in Auckland District Court, before Coroner Bell.

The inquest heard that in the hours before his death, Jerrim’s mother, Joan Toms, had called police to request a wellness check on her son, who had bipolar disorder.

But when police arrived at the Toms family home in Onehunga, a suburb of Auckland, Jerrim was not there and neither was his car, so the officer took the job off the police alert system.

That meant when the officers, codenamed Constable A and Constable B to protect their identities, confronted Toms on State Highway 1, they didn’t know about his mother’s emergency call or his mental health history.

A 2019 report from the Independent Authority for Police Conduct said police accepted it was “inappropriate” for the officer who did the welfare check on Toms to remove the alert system’s job after discovering he was not home.

‘The sad answer is no’ – Medical professional on providing more care

Today’s inquest heard from a medical professional (name and occupation withheld) who evaluated Toms about two weeks before he was shot and believed that drug use had precipitated his relapse.

He was a “bright, authentic and honest” man whose mental health had been affected by drug use, the medical professional said.

He told the court that in the four years since the incident he had asked himself “about 20 times” if he could have given Toms any extra care. “From my perspective, the sad answer is no.”

But the mental health care Toms received is under scrutiny in the investigation.

Documents before the coroner show the Auckland DHB mental health unit reviewed the standard of care Toms received in the weeks leading up to the shooting.

“Doctors told the review team that increased bed pressure has meant that discharges occur when patients are sufficiently accommodated for intensive follow-up in the community rather than fully accommodated,” the review said. .

For Toms, the lack of bed space meant that he was discharged before “full resolution of his mood and psychotic symptoms”.

Toms was just weeks away from being a father for the first time. “He talked about his dreams and about seeing his daughter,” said the medical professional, who saw Toms two weeks before he was shot. “Unfortunately that did not happen.”

Toms’ mental health records say that marijuana use “typically destabilized his mental state by increasing his paranoia” and that he “also used methamphetamine on occasion.”

Toxicology tests found small traces of methamphetamine, cannabis and alcohol in Toms’ blood after he was shot.

Police asked a forensic pathologist what effect methamphetamine had, but he said “it was not possible to correlate a postmortem blood methamphetamine level with specific behavior.”

Officers caught up with Toms after he stole gas from a gas station and was driving erratically, even stopping to threaten police with a machete and also smashing his own taillights.

In the final confrontation, Toms walked towards the two officers holding a machete and got within ten feet of them before they opened fire, hitting him twice in the chest before he turned and ran.

Autopsy results showed that the two chest wounds were fatal gunshots in their own right. A wound to his back, one of eight bullets fired as he fled pierced his lower right back, was serious but classified as “potentially non-fatal”.

The officers continued to fire even after Toms dropped his machete on the road, with the final shot coming when Toms was unarmed and 14 meters from the police.

Police are set to testify at the inquest on Monday.