INQUEST TOLD WILLEY HAD LETHAL LEVEL OF COCAINE IN HIS SYSTEM

Clay Willey died from cocaine use, an inquest into his death heard on
its first day Monday.

Pathologist J.D. McNaughton, who performed the autopsy on Willey days
after his death, said evidence points to a condition called agitated
delirium - also known as cocaine psychosis - as the cause of death.

Willey, 33, had a scarred and enlarged heart, McNaughton said, and
showed all four of the symptoms of the delirium.

He was the first witness to testify at the inquest into Willey's death
on July 22, 2003. It is scheduled to last seven to ten days. Willey
died in police custody about 16 hours after his arrest at Parkwood
Mall.

Prince George RCMP received a complaint just after 5 p.m. July 22 of a
man causing a disturbance on 11th Avenue near the Parkwood Mall
parkade, presiding coroner David Coverdale said.

When efforts by RCMP officers to address Willey verbally were
unsuccessful - he was noncompliant - the officers tried to restrain
him. Willey resisted aggressively, and the officers used physical
force, pepper spray, and handcuffs to restrain him. Willey was tied in
what is known as a hog-tie restraint, where the hands and feet are
bound together at the back of the body.

Willey continued to struggle when he was brought the RCMP cellblock,
and a Taser was used to subdue him.

An ambulance was called just after 5:30 p.m, and on the way to the
Prince George Regional Hospital, Willey stopped struggling and went
into cardiac arrest. He was rescussitated and spent the night in the
hospital, but died just after 9 a.m. the next morning.

McNaughton pointed to contraction-band necrosis in Willey's heart as
an important marker for cocaine abuse, and said the bruises and
scrapes on Willey's body - on his abdomen, his arms, his knees, his
face, and forehead - did not contribute to his death.

"There was not sufficient force to cause death," he said.

He said Willey had a high temperature, was acting bizarely, had
bizarre speech patterns, had a great deal of strength, then stopped
his aggressive behaviour suddenly when he went into cardiac arrest -
all signs of agitated delirium.

"That's in keeping with the syndrome," he said.

When asked by Dan Weatherly, counsel for the family, if the use of the
Taser - applied twice, to the back and the upper left arm - played a
role in the death, McNaughton said it was unlikely.

He said it is generally held that the death must occur within three to
four minutes of the Taser application before a link can be
established.

In Willey's case, he went into cardiac 20 minutes after the Taser was
applied to his skin.

"His behaviour did not seem to change (in the ambulance)," McNaughton
said. "We do not have that temporal relationship."

Weatherly asked if the Taser could have had an indirect effect on
Willey. Again, that was unlikely, McNaughton said.

He did agree with Weatherly that the best place for those suffering
from agitated delirium was the hospital, though he stressed restraint
and careful monitoring was vital for such a patient.

McNaughton acknowledged Willey's body was the first he'd examined that
had been exposed to a Taser shock.

In response to questions from both Weatherly and counsel for the RCMP
Helen Roberts, McNaughton said Willey's wounds were consistent with
blunt force trauma, but could not say for sure what caused them.

Weatherly asked if they were consistent with punches, kicks, and
stomps and falls; Roberts asked if they were consistent with witness
reports of Willey running into trees, climbing fences, and falling to
his knees on the pavement. McNaughton said all of those things could
be consistent with Willey's wounds.

Toxicologist Stuart Huckin, who analyzed Willey's blood, said he
agreed cocaine use was the probable cause of death, if no other causes
were apparent.

Willey's post-mortem blood showed .06 mg/litre of cocaine, and 2.6
mg/litre of one of its metabolites (the substances the body breaks
cocaine into), and a blood alcohol concentration of .11 per cent, or
over the legal limit.

Despite the presence of both cocaine and alcohol, a low level of
cocaethylene was discovered, Huckin said. The substance is produced
when both drugs are prsent in the bloodstream, and is extremely toxic.

As it was Huckin said, Willey's blood had twice the amount of cocaine
and metabolites as is generally considered the minimum lethal dose.

In response to a question from Weatherley, he said there is no
correlation between the amount of cocaine ingested and the incidence
of agitated delirium.

"It can occur at higher levels and at lower levels," he said. He also
acknowledged those with higher blood concentrations of cocaine have
survived.

During questioning from Roberts, Huckin said amphetamines found in a
sample of Willey's urine at the hospital were probably the "tail end"
of an ingestion one or two days before his death. Blood tests were
negative for those drugs, he said.

"I believe if there was nothing else present, there was sufficient
cocaine (in Willey's blood) to cause death," he said.

Coroner's counsel Christopher Godwin said inquest witnesses will
include: those who observed Willey before and during his arrest, the
officers that participated in and witnessed his arrest, a RCMP
use-of-force expert, a Vancouver Police Department use-of-force
expert, a biomedical engineer, and, possibly, representatives from
Taser International.