Vancouver police officers involved in a beating death in 2015 were told by their union not to take notes, according to newly-released exhibits in an ongoing public hearing.

The public hearing into the death of Myles Gray, called by the Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner, resumed Tuesday after a month-long pause.

Gray died in a Burnaby backyard, near the border with Vancouver, on Aug. 13, 2015. He suffered extensive injuries after being beaten by police, including a fractured eye socket, a broken nose and rib, a crushed voice box and a ruptured testicle.

The hearing is examining whether Vancouver Police Department constables Kory Folkestad, Eric Birzneck, Derek Cain, Josh Wong, Beau Spencer, Hardeep Sahota and Nick Thompson abused their authority by recklessly or intentionally using unnecessary force in Gray’s death.

On Wednesday, exhibits released to media as part of the hearing included interviews from previous inquiries into the case, including the Police Act investigation into Gray’s death conducted by RCMP Sgt. Robert Nash.

In their own words, the officers recounted both the confrontation with Gray, who one officer described as having “superhuman” strength, and the decisions they made around note-taking after the incident.

Cain said Gray was easily “the strongest person I’ve ever dealt with,” capable of lifting him up in the air while another officer clung to Gray’s back.

“I was convinced he was under the influence of a drug and in a state of excited delirium,” he told Nash.

Birzneck said he responded to Sahota’s call for help, when he heard she had locked herself in the police van after arriving on the scene.

He described Gray as going from being calm to being like “The Hulk” as officers tried to subdue him.

“He’s grumbling, mumbling, a lot of mumbling, like, he was growling,” Birzneck recalled.

A number of the officers said they were injured and shaken after the confrontation, which lasted several minutes.

Cain, a former paramedic, was emotional as he described his attempts to revive Gray when he stopped breathing, applying life-saving techniques in an attempt to restart his heart.

Union said not to take notes

In their interviews, the officers noted that the case was one of the first investigated by the Independent Investigations Office (IIO), established to provide civilian oversight of police.

Spencer, Cain and Thompson all said they were instructed by Vancouver Police Union agents not to make notes after the beating.

Nash asked the officers about the instructions they had received about best practices when it comes to note-taking.

“I was on the seventh floor of the Vancouver police station, waiting for the union and/or the IIO,” Wong told Nash.

“And I recall specifically, I started to write handwritten notes. I got out my notebook, got my pen out … and I was told, specifically, ‘Don’t write them.'”

Nash also asked the officers whether they had noted the date when they started recording their accounts of that fateful day — which were ultimately loaded into the police system months after Gray’s death occurred.

Spencer said he wrote his statement in December 2015 or January 2016.

“This was such uncharted territory … [dealing with] at that point, a brand new organization,” he said, in response to Nash’s question about whether it was best practice to wait that length of time before writing his statement.

“I wouldn’t be able to even tell you if that was normal or not, with an IIO investigation, because this was the first extreme circumstance that I’d ever been involved in.”

Family’s lawyer responds

The hearing has heard from witnesses including Gray’s mother Margie, as well as three other people who described seeing Gray before he entered the yard where he ultimately died.

All seven officers involved in the beating have denied the allegations of abusing their authority.

Ian Donaldson, the lawyer representing Gray’s family, said that the exhibits and the officers’ interviews resemble previous testimonies delivered at a coroner’s inquest.

“One of the issues here is the use of force, and the adjudicator will have to decide whether the use of force was excessive,” he said.

“Another issue is the failure to take contemporaneous notes and to make statements in a prompt fashion, as required by law and terms of employment.”