6 days Ago By Karen Bartko
A large police presence descended upon the Meadowlark area of west Edmonton, where a back alley was blocked off with tape after a suspected shooting involving officers. The investigation appeared to be focused on an apartment building and alley near 98 Avenue and 156 Street, in the West Jasper Place neighbourhood. Debbit Lamont has lived in the area for the better part of a decade and is shaken by what she heard go down outside her home.
She’d just arrived home from work and was laying down for a rest while her dog hung out on the patio, when she heard gunshots go off outside around 2 p.m. Tuesday.
“The dog jumped in the house and I jumped out of bed and I closed the patio door ’cause I was terrified,” Lamont said. “I heard a ‘pop, pop’ and the police officers were saying, ‘Put your hands behind your back, put your hand behind your back!’ And then all of a sudden it stopped — it got quiet.” Lamont said she re-opened her patio door and saw an injured man.
“He was laying on the ground and there was blood coming from what, I seen, out of his head,” she said, adding police then began to do CPR on the man before she saw him taken away in an ambulance. Lamont was terrified to hear the gunshots. The alley behind the Westside Manor apartment building on 156 Street was then taped off, and several pylons marked spots on the ground were items like clothing had ended up.
“The gun is still in the alleyway where he was shot, and there’s blood there, and now everything is blocked off,” Lamont said. Lamont doesn’t know if the man shot was living on the streets or a resident nearby, but admitted it can be a bit of a rough area. “In the wintertime it’s really bad.
Vagrants are in and out of the building, sleeping in the hallways, in the stairwells, in my building,” she said. “I got a deadbolt on my door and now a dog — hopefully she’ll protect me. “It’s a little sketchy around here.
Everybody calls it the ghetto, which, I mean — it’s happening everywhere, not just here, but it’s everywhere,” Lamont said. Lamont said it’s been that way since the pandemic began in 2020, when Edmonton’s vulnerable population doubled. “It is just chaos everywhere, you know?” she said, noting there are several spots in the west end where people living rough tend to gather.
“What can you? I don’t know. I mean, I’m sure that the police officers did their job, did the best they can, providing the safety of us.” The Edmonton Police Service has not said what happened, but members of the Alberta Serious Incident Response Team arrived later in the afternoon.
The government agency investigates incidents involving police officers that result in serious injury or death, along with allegations of misconduct..
