Editor’s note: The story below includes details about suicide that some readers may find disturbing.
Disturbing details of how former RCMP Sgt. Pierre Lemaitre died in 2013 emerged at the coroner’s inquest into his death Monday.
Lemaitre was the media spokesperson at the time of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski’s Taser-inflicted death at Vancouver International Airport in 2007.
Inquest counsel John Orr described to presiding coroner Vincent Stancato and a five-person jury the struggles the 55-year-old had been facing at the time of his death.
Orr referred to “traumatic incidents” in his career, as well as personal and relationship problems that had escalated throughout his life.
Orr told the jury Lemaitre’s post-traumatic stress disorder could happen “not just through traumatic events but also through feeling unsupported at work.”
He said the witnesses over the coming days would talk about issues at work that exacerbated what was happening in his personal life and explain “why a man of that age would take his own life.”
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Lemaitre was 28-year veteran of the RCMP and was serving in the traffic division at the time of his death. He was the first RCMP officer to speak to the media about Dziekanski’s death at YVR.
Lemaitre’s widow, Sheila, told the inquest about the events leading up to her husband’s death.
“I actually thought he was getting better,” and was making more of an effort to help her around the house, Sheila said of the weeks before his death.
There had been no mention of suicide, she told the inquest
The night before the Monday Lemaitre died was “unremarkable,” Sheila said.
On the morning of July 29, the couple had gotten up at about 8 a.m.
Sheila had gone downstairs to make breakfast, turning on the television as was the couple’s custom before muting it, and then turned off the channel once news of the verdict in the Dziekanski perjury trial came down. Const. Bill Bentley, the first of four officers to be charged in connection to Dziekanski’s death, was found not guilty that day.
Despite changing the channel, Sheila told the inquest that “Pierre saw” the news about the Dziekanski verdict.
Sheila described a morning of the couple puttering around the kitchen before she took one of their dogs to pick blueberries.
Lemaitre would usually be in the backyard with the other dogs, Sheila said.
But this morning was different.
“Dogs weren’t acting right,” she told the inquest.
“I couldn’t see Pierre and the dogs weren’t acting like he was outside.”
“It felt wrong” so Sheila rushed back to the home, worried something was amiss.
She searched the living room, the kitchen and the bedroom but could not find her husband.
“That concern, that worry I had, just got worse,” Sheila said
“When he wasn’t in the bedroom, the only other place was downstairs and so I went downstairs and turned around to see inside the rec room.”
Sheila paused, swallowing and seeming to choke back tears.
With a voice thick with emotion, she described finding Lemaitre.
“And he was hanging there. Still. There was no movement.”
Sheila told the inquest of the struggle to free Lemaitre from the rope, and of a frantic call to 911.
She was injured during an RCMP event many years back, and the pain from that injury made it difficult to free her husband.
Sheila sawed through the rope with scissors and Lemaitre fell to the ground with “a thump.”
“It’s a sound I’m always going to remember,” Sheila said.
“I apologized to him that I couldn’t let him down gently.”
She called 911 and first responders showed up on scene.
They told the inquest about what they saw when they arrived at the Lemaitre residence.
Police, fire crews and four paramedics responded to a call of cardiac arrest just after 9 a.m.
First responders found him with a “deep, purple ligature mark” on his neck and a blue-and-yellow dog leash hanging on an exercise machine beside his body.
They also found medication, including drugs for anxiety and depression, at the home.
Richard Ross, the coroner who assessed Lemaitre’s death, said the death was not an overdose and that the pills found in the seven vials added up to correct dosages being taken.
Lemaitre was deemed to be “over-medicated,” and had been struggling with anxiety and depression for some time.
Sheila said his medication was switched four weeks before his death to a regimen with side effects she found worrying.
She told the inquest Lemaitre had been desperate to find medication that would help him, and had described a “rage in his head that was burning his brain.” It was a rage that sometimes made Lemaitre lash out, Sheila said, and he told her “he can’t control it.”
“I have to try something, I can’t live like this,” Sheila recalled him telling her.
Paramedics described the 30-35 minutes they spent attempting to resuscitate him before an emergency doctor declared him dead shortly before 11 a.m.
Despite their struggles, one of the testifying paramedics told the inquest there was “no pulse recovered at any point.”
The coroner’s inquest will continue throughout the week and is not meant to find legal fault, but to prevent similar deaths.
