The mother of Mathew Dumas said words cannot describe how she feels after the inquest into the 2005 shooting death of her 18-year-old son wrapped up in Winnipeg Friday.

After waiting for more than three years for the inquest and then sitting through two weeks of testimony, Carole Chartrand said she still needs answers as to why her son died.

"It's like a trip to hell," Chartrand told reporters at a tearful news conference held by the Dumas family after the hearing concluded. "I wouldn't want anybody else to go through what I'm going through right now."

Dumas was shot by police who had chased him down because they suspected he had committed a robbery. They said they used pepper spray on him and also told him they would shoot if he didn't drop the screwdriver he was carrying. When he continued to come toward an officer in a threatening manner, he was shot, police said.

Dumas' older sister, Jessica Dumas, said the hardest part of the inquest was hearing that her brother spoke to police officers before he died, saying he couldn't breathe and asking them to take his jacket off.

Up until the inquest the family had only been given brief details about the shooting and "then you find out 3½ years later he was trying to say something," she said.

After hearing all of the information presented, the family remains convinced Dumas was a victim of racial profiling, just like native leader J.J. Harper, who was shot in 1988 after police mistook him for a car thief.

The Southern Chiefs Organization, a First Nations advocacy group that has supported the Dumas family throughout their ordeal, has called on Winnipeg police chief Keith McCaskill to repair the damage between the aboriginal community and police.

"We need to ensure that this never, ever happens again, that we don't have another one of our organizations supporting another family for 3½, four, five years, trying to get justice or answers as to why their son, who was walking down the street, within 14 minutes was shot and killed dead," spokesperson Nahanni Fontaine said.

Dumas family lawyer Donald Worme said if the police force had implemented the 140 recommendations handed down by the Aboriginal Justice Inquiry held after Harper's death, the response to Dumas on that cold January night may have been different.

The inquest report is expected to take about six months to complete.