RED DEER, Alta. -- RCMP in central Alberta say a suspect was shot and killed on Friday after a string of incidents in the Red Deer area.

RCMP said that the 37-year-old suspect was wanted by police in connection to a sexual assault of a 47-year-old woman and the attempted murder of a 20-year-old man, which occurred in a residential area of Red Deer early Christmas morning.

RCMP said that the man tried to help the woman who had been sexually assaulted when the suspect allegedly attempted to murder him.

Officers spotted the suspect in a stolen car in Sylvan Lake around 11:35 a.m. Officers tried to stop the suspect when he reversed his vehicle into a marked police car and then fled the scene.

Around 1 p.m. Red Deer RCMP found the stolen vehicle and the suspect near a front-end loader in an industrial park in northwest Red Deer. The man then entered the front-end loader and drove through a fence onto 11A and into a nearby lot where he allegedly crashed into multiple unoccupied vehicles and caused extensive damage.

The situation ended in a field just north of Red Deer where the suspect allegedly collided with a police car.  The officer inside the vehicle got out and fired several shots.  A second officer also fired several shots. 

The front-end loader continued driving through the field. Other RCMP officers were able to get close enough to see that the suspect was slumped over in the seat and no longer had control of the vehicle.

The front-end loader continued into a wooded area where it came to stop after becoming lodged against a tree.

When RCMP entered the front-end loader they found the man unresponsive and bleeding. EMS were called, but the man was pronounced dead at the scene.

Gary Davis who lives close by said he heard the event unfold while cooking Christmas dinner.

"We heard a wheel loader coming down the road with the sirens. And the wheel loader crashed into a police car right on our corner," Davis said. “That's when we got up to look out the window. And then we heard more than thirty or forty gunshots fired [because] they were trying to put the loader out of commission.”

In a news conference in Edmonton on Saturday, Insp. Gibson Glavin with the RCMP said that he could not confirm whether or not the man killed by RCMP was armed.

“It’s procedure and common sense for the police if they consider that the public is in imminent danger of bodily harm or death that we are authorized to be able to use sufficient force to stop that which often involves drawing our service pistol,” said Glavin. “So they would have felt that either for the public or themselves in order to draw their pistol.”

The Alberta Serious Incident Response Team, which investigates police related cases, will take over the investigation.

ASIRT investigators ask that anyone who was in the area of Township Road 391 and Range Road 273 at 1:15 p.m. on Decemeber 25 who may have seen the confrontation between police and the man to contact them at 403-592-4306.

With files from Frazer Snowdon and The Canadian Press