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Sylvia Klibingaitis, 52, was shot and killed by a Toronto police officer on Oct. 7, 2011, minutes after she called 911 from her North York home and warned the dispatcher she had a knife and meant to kill her mother.

According to a recording of the roughly nine-minute call, later played at a coroner's inquest, Klibingaitis gave the operator her address, asked for police and said, "I'm about to kill people." When the operator repeated the words back to her, she answered, "Yes, I have a deadly weapon and I intend to use it," and described the weapon as a foot-long knife. Asked why she wanted to kill her mother, she replied, "I'm pure evil."

Klibingaitis told the operator she had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder and was under psychiatric care. She said her mother was in the bathroom and that she was waiting in her mother's bedroom. The operator repeatedly urged her to put down the knife and walk to the front door, but she refused, according to the recording. The line then went quiet as she left the room.

Officers were outside when Klibingaitis came out of the house still holding the knife, the Special Investigations Unit later reported. Investigators found she walked toward the officers in what the agency called a threatening manner and did not drop the weapon despite repeated commands. One officer fired as she advanced, and she died at the scene.

Ontario's Special Investigations Unit, the civilian agency that reviews deaths involving police, cleared the officer in November 2011. Then-director Ian Scott found the officer was justified in firing because he faced a reasonable apprehension of death or serious injury with no way to retreat. No criminal charge was laid.

Her death was examined in a 2013 inquest alongside two other cases in which Toronto police shot mentally ill people carrying sharp objects, Reyal Jardine-Douglas and Michael Eligon. On Feb. 12, 2014, the five-member jury classified all three deaths as homicides, a coroner's designation that carries no criminal consequence, and endorsed 74 of 220 proposed recommendations. Among them were calls for more officer training in verbal de-escalation and for police to weigh a person's mental state, not only their behaviour, when confronting someone in crisis.