Winnipeg officer cleared in fatal 2023 shooting of University of Manitoba international student

A Winnipeg police officer has been cleared of any wrongdoing in the fatal 2023 killing of a 19-year-old international student who was having a mental-health crisis.

Afolabi Stephen Opaso was shot and killed by Winnipeg police at an apartment building near the University of Manitoba on Dec. 31, 2023.

Winnipeg police have said the student from Nigeria was acting erratically and claimed he was armed with two knives when he was shot. Opaso’s family has long maintained he was experiencing a mental breakdown.

A report released Wednesday by the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team (ASIRT) determined Opaso indeed ran at the officers holding two knives, at which point he was shot three times. The Alberta police watchdog concluded there was no reasonable ground to believe the officer committed an offence because he was defending himself.

ASIRT was tasked with investigating after Manitoba’s Independent Investigation Unit (IIU) learned an officer involved in the shooting is a close relative of an employee of Manitoba Justice, and they wanted to avoid any perceived conflict of interest.

The final report says Opaso was in an apartment with friends and appeared to be having a mental breakdown, which prompted his friends to dial 911. When police arrived, they told the 19-year-old to drop the knives. The report says one of the officers fired three shots when Opaso ran at them, while the other was reaching for their taser.

A witness recorded the incident from his bedroom in the apartment, the ASIRT report reads.

“On the short recording, a male says, ‘drop the knife, drop the knife!’ and then three shots are heard immediately after. Those words and the shots take less than three seconds.”

An autopsy determined Opaso was struck by three bullets: one entered his left chest and passed through a lung and the aorta; one entered his left back and entered a lung; and another entered his left hip area.

The report acknowledges one of the bullets struck Opaso in the back, “which in turn could mean that they were fleeing and posed no threat to the officer.

“A person can turn or duck and expose part of their back while still proceeding forward,” the report reads. “A person can also start to fall from one shot and get hit by another shot while falling. When a police officer fires a reasonable number of shots quickly and hits a person while falling, the shot can be justified because the officer may not know that the threat is ended. On the other hand, if there is a long pause before shots that hit a person in the back and the officer should have realized that the threat had ended, those shots may be unjustified.

“In this incident, there is an audio recording of the shots that shows that there were three shots in quick succession. There is no evidence that (Opaso) had stopped running at the officers. Based on the available evidence, a court is unlikely to find that (he) was fleeing the (officer) when he was shot in the back.”