Kyle Andrew Tait's death three years ago after being shot by a police officer was ruled a homicide by a coroner's jury Friday.

Tait, a Surrey 16-year-old, was shot and killed by police Aug. 23, 2005, when the stolen vehicle he was a passenger in was stopped by New Westminster police after a pursuit that ended up on Burns Street in Burnaby.

The inquest wrapped up Friday after a week of proceedings that included a toxicologist's testimony Thursday that Tait and the driver were likely not intoxicated at the time of the incident.

Heather Dinn, a toxicologist with the RCMP, said that Tait had no alcohol and no drugs of any kind in his body save for atropine, which was administered by medical personnel in an attempt to revive him.

The driver of the stolen SUV, Ian James William Campbell, had no alcohol in his blood samples. Dinn testified Campbell received dimenhydrinate, commonly known as Gravol and morphine at Royal Columbian Hospital where he was treated for gunshot wounds.

Dinn testified that Campbell was probably a daily user of marijuana, based upon her tests. However, she went on to say that she found no active THC in his blood, leading to the conclusion that he was not under the influence of marijuana at the time the blood samples were taken.

Dinn further testified that she found extremely low blood levels of methamphetamine. She characterized the amounts as almost trace levels, and testified that at those blood levels, Campbell would not have been intoxicated at the time the samples were taken.

It was unclear how much time elapsed between when the blood samples were taken and the police stop, although there was an uninitialled time of 0400 written on the sample vial, so the inquiry operated on the assumption the samples were taken four hours after the incident.

Dinn went on to testify that the intensity of a “high” from methamphetamine use depends on how it is ingested. She called lab testing “a snapshot in time,” saying “I can’t tell how the drug was ingested or when the drug was ingested.”

These resuts could indicate “a small amount recently used or a large amount ingested at a much earlier time. I can’t tell analytically which it was,” she added.

When asked by a juror whether Cambpell could have been impaired at the time of the incident, she said that methamphetamine is metabolized by the body quite slowly. Typically, it takes about 10 hours for the body to metabolize half the drug, and given Campbell’s very low blood levels, he was likely not intoxicated by methamphetamine at the time of the accident. But she went on to say that hypothetically speaking, there was one scenario in which a person could be intoxicated and four hours later have extremely low blood levels of the drug.

“If a small amount of drug was smoked at midnight, it would go straight from the lungs to the left heart and the brain, and gradually go to the blood, where its levels would be very very small,” she said.

The five-person jury delivered eight recommendations, which are not binding.

Inquests are formal court proceedings held to publicly review the circumstances of a death. The goal is fact finding, not fault finding. An inquest is mandatory if the deceased was in the care or control of a police officer or in a police lock-up at the time of their death. Upon conclusion, a written report is prepared. It includes the classification of the death and whenever possible recommendations of the jury on how to prevent a similar death.

- By Margot Barton