No charges recommended for Surrey officer in shooting death of refugee: IIO

B.C.’s police watchdog says it isn’t recommending charges in the fatal police-involved shooting of Vanessa Rentería, a Colombian refugee, in Surrey last year.

On Sept. 19, 2024, police were called out after reports that a woman was breaking things in her home and had locked herself in the bathroom. Officers say that when they got to the home, they found the woman in the bathroom holding scissors to her baby’s neck. Police say that after officers tried to have a conversation with the woman — who was speaking in Spanish — there was an “interaction” and an officer shot her. She died of her injuries.

Jessica Burglund, the chief civilian director for the Independent Investigations Office of BC (IIO), says the force used by the officer was necessary to protect the baby from its mother.

“I found that it was reasonable for the officer in this case to believe that there was a threat of bodily harm or death to the baby when he fired the shot,” Burglund said.

Language barriers complicated the standoff, she says. At one point, the officers were using Google Translate to communicate with the woman, according to the IIO report.

Last year, community groups, including the BC Civil Liberties Association and Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS), called for an investigation of the incident, saying Rentería was a mother and union activist who came to Canada in search of a better life.

In a statement, BWSS executive director Angela Marie MacDougall says the report shows that the “core pillars of safe crisis-response were absent” in the interaction.

“There was no meaningful risk assessment, no linguistically competent intervention, and no trauma-informed de-escalation,” MacDougall said.

“By ignoring these, the system failed her before armed officers even arrived.”

Rather than calming the moment, she says, police escalated it.

“Armed formations, repeated shouted commands, and a tactical posture turned vulnerability into justification for force, rather than offering genuine sanctuary,” she said.

In addition, MacDougall says, the IIO’s response shows a narrow focus.

“It treats Vanessa’s pain as pathology rather than as the predictable outcome of violence, marginalization, and systemic neglect,” she said.

Rentería’s mental distress was inseparable from the crisis surrounding gender-based violence and housing insecurity, MacDougall says.

“Vanessa was a newcomer, a mother, and someone who had already sought refuge from an abusive environment,” she said.

“BWSS has documented that her history of leaving a home with abuse and her status as a Spanish speaker in a city with inadequate interpretation built structural risk into her encounter with RCMP.”

She says Rentería’s death demands a reckoning of how policing and crisis systems fail survivors of abuse.

Burglund says the case against the officer is now closed.

— With files from Michael Williams.