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VANCOUVER — A Vancouver police officer involved in the deadly confrontation with Myles Gray in 2015 says there was considerable uncertainty about the situation before he and other officers encountered him in response to an urgent call for back-up.
Const. Eric Birzneck says at the ongoing public hearing into Gray’s death that he and other responding officers were “going into the unknown” before ascending a staircase on a street near the boundary between Burnaby and Vancouver to find him.
Birzneck is testifying at the hearing called by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner hearing in Vancouver to determine if he or six other officers intentionally or recklessly used unnecessary force in the violent altercation with Gray.
He is the first to testify among the officers, all of whom deny wrongdoing in the incident.
Birzneck says he never used force beyond what was required to control Gray and never lost control of his emotions.
He says information relayed over the radio after a call can be “completely inaccurate,” and different circumstances call for different responses when situations are “dynamic and unfolding.”
The officer testified on Wednesday that he extended his police baton before going up the set of stairs, but he didn’t know what they were going to be dealing with until they “laid eyes” on the subject of the call.
Birzneck said it wasn’t a “forgone conclusion” that there was going to be a fight with the suspect, though he believed Gray could have been placed under arrest based on a call to police about him threatening someone and spraying a woman with water.
He told the hearing that a situation could be active or “amped up” when a call was received, but calm by the time officers arrived.
“Policing is not linear. You’re going into a situation, you have a certain amount of information. In this case, not a whole ton of information. It’s as you go, the situation changes,” he told the public hearing, which began in January but has been repeatedly delayed.
The officer also discussed a police form he filled out in the aftermath of the incident, telling his lawyer, Greg Cavouras, that he had never been in a more intense struggle in his career.
He told the hearing that he filled out the “subject behaviour officer response” report to suggest there was no sign Gray would have co-operated with police.
Birzneck, whose testimony began on Tuesday, said Wednesday that he checked boxes on the form to indicate “pre-assault cues” from Gray, including a “thousand-yard stare,” clenched fists, non-compliance and spitting.
He also said Gray displayed “incredible strength” and seemed “impervious to pain.”
A police disciplinary process previously determined none of the seven officers committed misconduct, and no charges have been laid over Gray’s death, which a 2023 coroner’s inquest ruled was a homicide, a term that does not assign legal blame.
The inquest heard that Gray was left with injuries that included a fractured eye socket, a crushed voice box and ruptured testicles, while a paramedic told the inquest that Gray’s bruising was so severe, he initially thought he was not a white man.
At least three of the other officers involved in Gray’s deadly arrest are scheduled to testify, including constables Beau Spencer, Nick Thompson and Josh Wong.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 14, 2026.
Darryl Greer, The Canadian Press
