Regis Korchinski-Paquet’s mother questioned the purpose of a coroner’s inquest examining the circumstances of her daughter’s death as well as the video and audio evidence presented in it, as lawyers for several police officers pressed her Tuesday to clarify what she saw that day.
Claudette Beals was again shown excerpts of a video combining security footage from the hallway outside the apartment with audio from a police microphone as she resumed her testimony at the inquest.
Last week, Beals testified she saw police push her daughter toward the balcony, causing the inquest to halt for several hours as counsel for the parties figured out how to move forward.
A lawyer representing one of the officers who was in the apartment when Korchinski-Paquet went over the balcony cross-examined her Tuesday, suggesting Beals was only inside the apartment for about a minute and also didn’t understand what was happening at the time.
Gary Clewley played a portion of the video where someone can be heard asking, “What is she doing?”
Last week, Beals agreed it was her and that she was talking about her daughter, but at one point Tuesday, she said she was actually asking what police were doing, drawing further questions.
“That’s you, isn’t it?” Clewley asked after pausing the clip.
“That’s me because I couldn’t hear Regis’s voice anymore and I wanted to know what was going on,” Beals said.
As the exchange went on, Beals voiced her frustration with the inquest process.
“I thought this was for change. I didn’t really know that I’m going through a court case and we’re here to make the police look better,” she said, a sentiment she later repeated. “I didn’t know that the inquest was about this.”
Moments later, she asked to take a break and the inquest paused for lunch.
The nearly 50-minute video, which in some parts includes audio from five 911 calls, has previously been played in its entirety.
Korchinski-Paquet, a 29-year-old Afro-Indigenous woman, fell to her death from a 24th-floor balcony while police were in the home on May 27, 2020.
The inquest has largely focused on her history of seizures from epilepsy and the episodes of confusion and aggressive behaviour that often followed, as well as police procedures and training.
A neurologist who did not treat her but examined her records testified that she’d shown symptoms in keeping with postictal delirium on several occasions in the years before her death. Postictal delirium is an altered mental state that can occur after seizures.
Korchinski-Paquet had experienced two seizures that day, one in the early morning and one in the early afternoon, her mother testified. Beals was one of three people to call 911, and she said she was hoping police would take her daughter to Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
On Tuesday, Beals said she felt police escalated the situation. She repeated her allegation that police pushed her daughter toward the balcony and added another: that they’d pushed Korchinski-Paquet in the hallway.
She said the incident was captured on video but agreed it wasn’t in the stretch played for her Tuesday, which began with the officers’ arrival at the building and continued past the point when Korchinski-Paquet went into the apartment with two officers.
A lawyer representing the Toronto Police Association asked Beals about the interview she gave to a police watchdog shortly after her daughter’s death.
At the time, Beals told the Special Investigations Unit that she had heard from her son that officers were “grabbing” Korchinski-Paquet in the hallway but hadn’t seen it herself, Peter Ketcheson said.
Beals said Tuesday she didn’t recall everything during the interview but now remembered officers pushing her daughter in the hallway.
Ketcheson noted Beals made several comments during her testimony calling into question the video and audio evidence shown at the inquest. “Because you don’t trust the video, correct?” he said.
“I don’t trust the police, that’s the problem, not a video — video can’t do nothing by itself, but somebody can alter it,” she said.
“So if I showed you a video that shows something different, you wouldn’t care because you know what you saw,” Ketcheson asked shortly afterward.
“I know what I saw and … your videos could be altered,” she replied. Her testimony wrapped Tuesday afternoon.
The SIU has cleared the officers of any wrongdoing in Korchinski-Paquet’s death. The agency found she fell as she was trying to move from her apartment’s balcony to the neighbouring one.
Last Friday, the Toronto Police Association posted on social media that its lawyers would “vociferously cross-examine” Beals about her allegation against police.
Jurors in a coroner’s inquest do not assign blame or legal responsibility but can issue recommendations meant to prevent similar deaths in the future. Those recommendations are not binding, however.
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 27, 2026.
By Paola Loriggio | Copyright 2026, The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.