They say that time heals all wounds, but for Jeannette Rogers, the scab is ripped off and bleeds fresh every time an innocent person is killed in police custody. Losing someone in such a senseless way is a club nobody wants to be part of, but in the past few weeks, two more families joined her ranks.
A 25-year-old man died in Halifax on Feb 22, after police found him “experiencing a mental health crisis” and Tasered him when he allegedly became aggressive. Six days later, police say a 37-year-old man who was having a “mental health episode” and became aggressive with officers also died in custody after he was Tasered.
Both deaths have been turned over to the province’s Serious Incident Report Team—SIRT is Nova Scotia’s police watchdog—to investigate the incidents and decide what charges, if any, should be brought.
They are stories that bring up a gamut of emotions for Rogers—the main one being disgust at the lack of progress made in handling incidents of mental health, intoxication and addiction.
“I’m not the least bit surprised. They haven’t made any changes, so why would things be different?” says Rogers in a phone interview with The Coast. “Obviously they haven’t learned a lot, and police are not trained to deal with mental health so the first thing they do is bring out a Taser or throw a spit hood over their head.”
It has been almost nine years since Rogers’ son, Corey, was killed by two police constables who admittedly didn’t have the training or expertise to place him in a spit hood—a controversial fabric restraint device used to prevent someone from biting or spitting in custodial settings. They are often forcibly put over someone’s head to cover the face and mouth, which can make it difficult to breathe.
Corey—a known alcoholic who had been suffering with the disease for years—was taken into custody the day after the birth of his daughter, for being publicly intoxicated outside of the children’s hospital where she was born. Video of the arrest shows a groggy Corey being carried into the booking area and the three arresting officers bringing him into the cell, where he was placed on the floor with the spit hood still covering his face.
“With Corey, he has been in and out of the dry cells so many times that they just saw him and thought, oh well, here he is again,” says Rogers. “They didn’t treat him as a human being.”
Protocol for someone in police custody for intoxication is to check on them periodically to ensure that they know where they are and why; if they are in a spit hood, the checks are supposed to happen every 15 minutes. They put Corey in the cell sometime just after 10pm. He choked on his vomit and passed away at 11:37pm. The police didn’t discover him until after 1am.
“It brings everything back again and I’m totally disgusted with the police department because somewhere, someone isn’t doing their job by checking on these people every 15 minutes,” says Rogers. “I worked in psychiatry and if we had 15-minute checks to do, we did them and stayed late if we had to to get our paperwork done. It wasn’t optional.”
SIRT did bring charges on the two constables—Daniel Fraser and Cheryl Gardner—who were in charge of Corey at the time of his death, and they were found guilty by a jury of criminal negligence. Upon appeal, a judge reversed the decision. The judge said that in hindsight, both of the accused made poor calls in not sending Rogers to hospital, but he said this didn’t meet the legal test for criminal negligence.
“Undoubtedly, both accused persons exhibited imperfect behaviour, and at times demonstrated poor judgment. With the benefit of hindsight, we now know that Mr. Rogers ought to have received prompt medical attention,” the judge wrote. “Nevertheless, the fact that the accused didn’t enter the cell, remove the spit hood and get Mr. Rogers required medical attention does not in the circumstances equate with guilt of the criminal charge.”
“Dan Fraser charted two checks that he didn’t do, and we know he didn’t do them because we have him on video sitting at his office playing his harmonica,” says Rogers. “The judge said that didn’t matter because Corey was already dead by that point.”
The recent deaths have prompted vital conversations about the role that police should play in mental health emergencies. A lack of training and education make police ill-equipped to deal with these kinds of emergencies—and people who are not criminals are getting killed because of it.
Rogers agrees—and has been saying that for the better part of a decade. “What they need to do is de-fund the police and put that money into sobering facilities where intoxicated people can be taken instead of jail,” says Rogers. “And that money should come out of the police budget.”
She’s frustrated that the police have tools at their disposal that they don’t know how to use properly. The wrapping on a spit hood, for example, explicitly states that you are not to leave people unattended with it on. You’d think at the very least they could read the instructions.
The beautiful silver lining coming from this tragedy is Corey’s daughter Hailie—whose birthday is celebrated every year on the eve of her father’s death. She is thriving and has been living with her grandmother for the past two and a half years.
“I had her in grief music therapy and she did well with that. The first session, the instructor told her to light a candle for someone that she knew had passed away, and she lit one for her father,” says Rogers. “We show her pictures and we talk a lot about him, but we haven’t told her the details about what happened because she’s still so young.”
Rogers believes it was probably the extreme emotion of Hailie’s birth that threw Corey into a binge, but she says that he was planning on starting a course of Antabuse— a medication used in the treatment of alcohol use disorders by producing unpleasant side effects and sensitivity to alcohol—as soon as they brought Hailee home from the hospital.
Unfortunately, he never got the chance to try to be a sober dad.
This article appears in Mar 1-31, 2025.