18 Years Later, Cartoon Network Fans Haven’t Stopped Questioning Why the Police Killed ‘Ed, Edd n Eddy’ Creator Paul Boyd
No charges were ever filed in the shooting death of animation legend and Ed, Edd n Eddy creator Paul Boyd by a Vancouver police officer, but the online cartoon fandom still believes that Boyd deserves justice.
On August 13, 2007, officer Lee Chipperfield, who was responding to a disturbance call in the Vancouver area, confronted Boyd and ended up shooting him nine times, killing Boyd with a shot to the head while he was crawling on the ground unarmed. Boyd had been battling bipolar disorder for 20 years before his death, and some witnesses to his death claimed that he had been swinging around a bike chain in a state of mania when the police killed him — although other witnesses reported that the chain was made of paper clips. The Vancouver Police Department quickly cleared Chipperfield of any wrongdoing in the shooting, and he returned to work the very next day after the killing.
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Over the next six years, Boyd’s family would fight tirelessly for authorities to investigate claims of excessive use of force in Boyd’s death, eventually convincing the Criminal Justice Branch to appoint a special prosecutor to the case. While the prosecutor declined to press charges against Chipperfield due to their lack of belief in their ability to get a conviction, fans of Boyd’s work continue to argue that his day in court is too long overdue:
In May 2012, a video taken by a witness of the killing that captured the seventh and eighth shots fired by Vancouver police leaked to the public, and the footage shows an officer firing the fatal shot into Boyd’s head while the animator was wounded and crawling on the ground. Shortly after the video surfaced, Boyd’s sister, Deborah Boyd, spoke to The Vancouver Sun about her family’s long battle to hold the police officers who killed her brother responsible for the tragedy.
“All everyone has heard is that the police responded to a call of a man swinging a bike chain,” Deborah Boyd explained. “This is TOTALLY untrue. That is not what they were initially responding to. Did you know that the first two officers on the scene had originally approached him as a witness? That he wasn’t doing anything but sitting calmly at a bus stop with another man? Did you know that one of the two officers pulled a gun on him, and had him face down on the ground complying with them? But their failure to follow proper procedure gave him the opportunity to jump up and pull a bicycle chain out of his backpack.”
“All of this came out in the coroner’s inquest,” Boyd explained, “It didn’t make any difference.”
Shortly before the video of the killing leaked, the British Columbia Police Complaint Commissioner released a report that claimed there was no “clear, convincing and cogent evidence” of “unnecessary force or excessive force during this incident,” coming to the conclusion based on the input of use-of-force expert Dr. Bill Lewinski. Lewinski argued that Chipperfield’s “intense emotional reaction” to Boyd pulling out a bike chain rendered him “inattentionally blind” when he opened fire. Lewinsky opined, “No one at this incident has a full, complete and factually accurate picture of the incident.”
But Deborah Boyd didn’t believe that the official report even attempted to come close to “factual accuracy,” especially when it came to Chipperfield’s account of the incident. “Witnesses said he was on his hands and knees, they said he was crawling but all Chipperfield had to do was say Paul was standing, that he was threatening," Boyd criticized of the official story. “It didn’t matter what anyone else said. Even the other officer said he was crawling. All that mattered was what Chipperfield said.”
Eighteen years later, the Ed, Edd n Eddy following hasn’t forgotten about the beloved brother, uncle and animator who left his mark on cartoon history. Boyd was just 39 years old when he was killed.
