Witness calls 2015 police shooting of Ekamba-Boekwa a ‘Wild West shootout’

A witness to a deadly police shooting in a family-filled Mississauga housing complex last year is challenging the police version of what went down the night 22-year-old Marc Ekamba-Boekwa died in a hail of gunfire.

According to the province’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU), police received a report just after 4 p.m. on March 20, 2015, that someone claimed they’d received a death threat made by a neighbour. The person claimed a female neighbour had called her a “witch,” threatened her with death, and threw a knife at her.

Five hours later, police arrived on scene at 3070 Queen Frederica Drive in Mississauga and while attempting to arrest the neighbour and her 22-year-old son, an altercation ensued. The SIU claimed Ekamba-Boekwa, armed with a kitchen knife, screamed at the officers to release his mother, who had been restrained after hitting one of the officers on the head with a metal pot.

Officers drew their guns and warned the man to stop, according to the SIU. When he did not stop, three officers fired their weapons.

Police fired 19 shots at Ekamba-Boekwa.

Eleven bullets hit their mark, while eight went whizzing around the neighbourhood. One struck a college student in the back as she was in her kitchen. Another hit a police officers bulletproof vest.

The SIU cleared the three police officers of any wrongdoing. So, too, did an internal investigation by Peel Regional Police.

In a media statement, the SIU said it believes the shooting was justified after interviews with 18 civilian witnesses and nine police witnesses. The three officers who fired the bullets maintained their right to silence and were not interviewed by the SIU, nor did they hand over their notes.

The SIU said Ekamba-Boekwa “was armed with a knife and clearly intending to do harm with it.”

But Camille Zreik, the father of the young woman struck by a stray bullet, painted a very different picture of the incident.

Zreik said he watched a “Wild West shootout” unfold right in front of his eyes.

“The night of the incident I was standing at the door,” he explained. “It was first an argument. The police and that lady and her son. Then his mother hit the police with a frying pan and they start to tackle her. The kid took off.”

“When he came back … no shirt, no shoes, hands in the air, he said ‘leave my mother alone’.”

Zreik said that from the distance he was standing, about 10 feet away, he could see that Ekamba-Boekwa was unarmed.

He watched as one officer then fired three shots at Ekamba-Boekwa’s chest.

“First one in the heart, then the other one in the middle and then the other one on the other side. That’s from one cop,” he said. “Then (the bullets) came from all over. Like rain.”

Zreik said he confronted the officer later about the shocking incident.

“I tell the officer there, ‘What? You think you live in the Wild West? This is a residential area’.”

Zreik’s daughter, Suzan, was standing in the kitchen of her home cutting limes when one of the stray bullets struck her in the back.

Suzan tried to have criminal charges laid against the officer who shot her but lost her legal battle. Her lawyer, Michael Moon, said he has written statements from other witnesses who also said the Ekamba-Boekwa was not armed when he was shot.

“What have statements from people who have indicated that the decent did not have a knife at the time of the shooting,” Moon said. “If that’s the case than it was not a justified shooting.”

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Black Lives Matter Toronto said this is another case that screams for a change in legislation so SIU directors reports are made public.

“We don’t have to look too far, just down in the States where they have riots because of so many people being killed by the police. They have more transparency in the States than they do up here,” Moon explained. “They have Grand Jury inquiries. They don’t have that here … in the States they have the facts. Up here, everything is just a cone of silence.”