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Blamed and Broken: The Mounties and the Death of Robert Dziekanski
360Overview
Images of Robert Dziekanski convulsing after being shocked by a Mountie’s Taser went viral in 2007. International outrage and domestic shame followed the release of that painful video. It had taken just twenty-six seconds for four Mounties to surround and stun the Polish would-be immigrant at Vancouver International Airport.
A decade later, after millions of dollars spent on an inquiry, and bungled prosecutions laden with bias and interference, the tragic impact of those fleeting seconds on the people involved — Dziekanski's mother and the four Mounties — is at last revealed.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781459742932 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Dundurn Press |
| Publication date: | 02/05/2019 |
| Pages: | 360 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
WHY ARE THE POLICE NOT HERE?
AT FIRST, no one notices him. He's dressed in tan pants and a windbreaker that's nearly white. His clothes are loose-fitting and flap as he walks, as if he were covered with a sheet like a Halloween ghost. He could be a ghost, if not for the luggage cart he's pushing toward the meeting area of Vancouver International Airport. There aren't many people here to notice him, anyway. It's nearly one on a Sunday morning. Flights have all but ceased. The normally crowded greeting hall is now populated by perhaps a dozen tired-looking figures dressed for the city's mid-October chill. Bleary-eyed, most are patiently focused on the swinging glass doors that automatically open as each newly arrived passenger emerges from the International Reception Lobby, known as the IRL. The IRL is a semi-secure part of the airport, just outside the cavernous high-security hall that houses baggage carousels, Customs, and Immigration. Beyond the one-way glass doors on the public side, there are repeated scenes of welcome: parents hugging children, reunited partners kissing, and friends shaking hands. The touching sentiments are brief in these wee hours and most head quickly toward the exit and home, arm-in-arm or holding hands.
No one is waiting for the invisible man as he approaches the automatic doors with three suitcases piled neatly on his cart. As he crosses the threshold, the doors close behind him. He follows the long walkway marked by a wood and steel railing, which ends in the public greeting hall. He pauses briefly. His head moves from side to side as if he's scanning for something or someone. Instead of heading for the exit he turns his cart sharply and almost trips as he steers his luggage back toward the glass wall from behind which he had just appeared. A few minutes later, the man hoists his bags from his cart up and over the railing, piling them on the floor by the automatic doors, like a barricade. Once over the railing himself, he begins hitting the glass doors with his hands. He is no longer invisible. People turn and stare.
The banging reverberates to a section of the hall where a young man is stretched out on a row of bench chairs. Paul Pritchard is trying to get some sleep after several seemingly interminable flights from Shenzhen, China. A rootless traveller at twenty-five, Pritchard has been on the road for years, having left his home in Victoria, B.C., at eighteen. Pritchard was teaching English in China when his father called him to say the lung cancer he was battling was terminal, and could Paul come home? Hours earlier he had made it to San Francisco to catch a connecting flight to Vancouver.
Pritchard has never been one to embrace convention or authority — as a teen he had encounters with the police. He used a fake university degree and bogus teaching certificate to land the job in China. Pritchard routinely refuses to stand in line while planes are boarding. As fate would have it, as he sat waiting for the Vancouver flight lineup to shorten, he fell asleep in a chair right beside the gate. He awoke half an hour later. The plane was gone. The only other flight he could get put him in Vancouver long past the deadline to catch the last ferry to Vancouver Island, where his father waited in Victoria.
Pritchard has no money for a hotel room, so he crashes on the benches in the airport terminal with his big blue backpack. In countless ways, Pritchard's long-standing suspicion of authority and penchant for shortcuts has carved the path that has brought him to this moment. Unable to sleep, Pritchard stands up to get a better look at the spectacle unfolding by the glass doors.
In 2007, cellphones are not nearly as ubiquitous as they are today. Those that do have built-in cameras can manage to record only notoriously bad, pixilated images. The first iPhone, which has a slightly better resolution, isn't on the market in Canada yet. Pritchard is not using his phone to record the scene, however; he is making use of the digital camera he bought for his travels. He instinctively grabs it, but doesn't turn it on.
As Pritchard looks on, he strikes up a conversation with a traveller from Texas, who is just as curious about why the hell that guy is banging on the glass. They are trading thoughts and speculation, when a man in a suit with his hands in his pockets strides up to the peculiar scene.
Lorne Meltzer wants to get through the doors that are now blocked by suitcases and their increasingly irrational owner. Meltzer is a limo driver here to pick up a client coming in on a flight from New York City. Meltzer has an access card that allows him to open the swinging glass doors so he can wait in the IRL for his fare. He approaches just as the wild-eyed man smashes a chair against the glass.
"Hold on!" Meltzer yells, as he reaches inside his coat for his access card. The man clenches his fist as if anticipating Meltzer's hand will emerge from his jacket gripping a weapon. Meltzer thinks that on a scale of one to ten, with ten being the point at which the man is ready to attack, this guy is at nine. Meltzer swipes his card on the reader. The doors open.
When the man doesn't budge, Meltzer loses it. "Look you fuckin' asshole, I need to get through here," Meltzer yells, just inches from the man's face, which is now glistening with perspiration. The man's black hair is matted with sweat. His eyes are glassy. He slowly backs down and starts hauling his bags through the open doors. He begins to build a makeshift barricade on the threshold using his luggage and some stools from a dark and deserted information counter beside the doorway.
Why am I not filming this? Pritchard suddenly thinks. Years of travel have taught him to point a camera at anything that might be worth a look later on.
Pritchard starts recording the man who has barricaded himself at the entrance of the IRL. The man sounds like he's talking to himself, alternately yelling and muttering under his breath. Whatever language he's speaking, it's not English.
Lorne Meltzer's only priority is his customer on the Cathay Pacific flight from New York City. "Five minutes before Cathay comes down with three hundred people on it," he says loudly, with frustration. Before disappearing to try to find security, Meltzer appeals to the handful of people in the waiting area, and asks if anyone speaks any other languages.
A woman, who's been watching the man's erratic behaviour since it began, approaches. Sima Ashrafinia is here to pick up her husband, who's also on that flight from New York City. She's concerned that there is no sign of security to deal with this man who's running amok and is clearly manic. He's sweating profusely. He seems out of breath and angry as he stands between the absurdly flapping automatic doors. He shouts to the onlookers in a language no one understands, except him. If anyone spoke Polish, they'd know the man is not only lucid, he is dead serious.
"I will trash this office. Fuck off!"
The man's tone alone is enough to make some people fear his next move. Ashrafinia isn't immediately worried. There is a wood and steel railing between her and the man, and, she thinks to herself, It's not like he has a knife or a gun.
Ashrafinia knows what that threat is like. Nearly thirty years earlier, in the midst of the Iranian revolution, living in Tehran meant falling asleep to the sound of machine-gun fire. Back then, when she and her friends engaged in protests and shouting matches with Islamist supporters of Ayatollah Khomeini, the worst she feared was being pelted with eggs and tomatoes. She carried a newspaper and matches, believing smoke would reduce the effects of tear gas. Her sense of danger changed suddenly during a massive demonstration prompted by the edict that all women had to start wearing head scarves. That day, gunshots rang out. People started running. They ducked into alleys. They knocked furiously on doors to get off the street. As people scrambled, Ashrafinia thought her friend — pregnant at the time — had tripped. Turning to help her up, Ashrafinia noticed blood on the pavement. The gunmen were approaching. Ashrafinia's decision to run with everyone else has haunted her every day since. Her decision to flee the country came after she spent a couple of weeks in prison. Authorities found her with books by Karl Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre. She was jailed after the banned material was burned in her backyard.
The man behind the makeshift barricade is now wielding a folding wooden table like the kind you might have beside an easy chair to hold your snacks while watching TV. He's holding it at chest height, legs pointed toward Ashrafinia.
"Russia?" she says to him, hoping for recognition. There is none. She tries words in Turkish and Italian. Ashrafinia has two deaf siblings, and tries some sign language she knows. It only seems to anger him. He's thrusting the wooden table legs like a weapon.
"For fuck's sake. I will sue you and everybody else," the man yells in Polish. It's gibberish to everyone else. He's breathing so heavily his chest is heaving. It's not from any physical exertion because he's not really moving, except to step in front of his improvised wall of luggage and chairs to threaten people. "Fine, fine," he utters in Polish. "We are in a different country so ..." he trails off unintelligibly. He understands that what he's doing is probably a bad idea. He is not irrational.
Ashrafinia approaches with an outstretched hand, the same sort of gesture you might use to try to tame the fear of a frightened pet. There's no mistaking her body language and demeanour. Anyone can tell she means to help. Yet it only seems to anger him. He thrusts the wooden table legs again.
"I will smash the entire desk. I will smash the entire desk ... leave me alone, everybody! Go away I said."
Ashrafinia, oblivious to the man's violent intentions, persists. She gestures with her hand, beckoning him to come out from the doorway. The man retreats instead and focuses the pointed table legs directly at Ashrafinia's head, a few feet away.
"For fuck's sake!" he says to the woman trying to help him.
Paul Pritchard has been recording the exchange but stops when he notices he's running out of room on his camera's memory card. He takes a moment to flip through its contents, deleting images he doesn't want to gain some recording time. When he turns the camera back on, it seems like this standoff could last a while. Pritchard chuckles at the prospect of having a story to entertain friends and family.
Pritchard isn't the only person whose accidental presence here will profoundly affect the lives of many people. Lois Steckley has come to the airport to pick up her son from a flight arriving from Mexico. She doesn't know it yet, but she's mixed up the date of the flight, and her son won't arrive until tomorrow. Steckley is not supposed to be here tonight. Now she's aghast and a little angry that this man has been allowed to run rampant for half an hour with nary a cop in sight. Steckley looks for security guards, and can't find any. She picks up a white airport courtesy phone that connects her to no one. Then she dials 9-1-1.
"Airport Operations, what's your emergency?" a female voice comes down the line.
"There's a guy over here and he's really aggressive ... he's really drunk and he's throwing suitcases around," Steckley says breathlessly.
"I'm just going to send the police," the operator tells her. "Could I get a description?"
"You can't miss him," Steckley offers.
"He doesn't seem to have any weapons? He's just throwing suitcases?"
"I have no idea."
Steckley is concerned about her son. She's worried he's somewhere on the other side of the glass. The same side as the "lunatic," she tells the operator.
"He's pissed, he's been drinking. He's not white ... I guess he's in his fifties, forties, I don't know."
"Alright, I'll have somebody come down right away." The operator puts Steckley on hold for a minute or two and returns. "I've called the police. They're on their way."
"Oh, now this guy's going to start throwing furniture around, right through the glass," Steckley warns.
The operator hears a smash. "He threw it through the glass?" she asks.
"He's doing it now, yup," Steckley confirms.
As Steckley watches, the man rips a keyboard from a computer on the vacant information desk, raises it above his head, takes aim at the glass between him and Ashrafinia and throws it with both hands. It bounces and hits the floor. It does not break the glass, but the Airport Operations dispatcher believes otherwise.
Ashrafinia has tried for many minutes to get through to the man in the most calm and non-threatening ways possible. But her persistent efforts have been futile. Not even a yellow-jacketed security guard who has shown up is enough to deter the man now. The guard is permitted only to observe and report. He stands safely several metres away and watches the man pick up the wooden table next.
"He's freaking out!" Lorne Meltzer yells.
The man uses all his might to whip the table at the glass wall between him and everyone else. The glass holds but the force of his throw shatters the furniture into pieces.
"Jesus Christ," Pritchard says, as the man next grabs a computer monitor. He winds up to try again. Now those in the waiting area yell back at him. "No, no, no!" It's a word that must be universally understood. The man puts the heavy video screen down on the floor. He casually examines his hands for any harm he may have done to himself during his violent bout of vandalism. "Why are the police not here?" Pritchard wonders aloud.
The police are eating lunch. Just a minute's drive from the terminal, a group of Mounties makes small talk during their meal break on the nightshift. Even though seventeen million people will come and go through YVR — the common shorthand for the Vancouver airport using the international airport code — the RCMP's base of operations here is too small to be a full detachment. So it's deemed a subdetachment and its members deal only with such police matters at the airport as lost or stolen passports and the like. They haven't been to many violent calls. It's been a quiet night for these rookies. As they sit in a small office that doubles as a lunchroom, their radios crackle alive in unison. There is an instinctive "holy shit" moment as the adrenaline kicks in.
"Intoxicated male, throwing luggage around, Level Two."
One officer responds immediately with his unique radio call sign to indicate both "message received" and "we're on our way": "Two-three," says Constable Kwesi Millington into his radio.
As the three drop their food, the dispatcher continues.
"Copy two-three. We don't have much information. It came from Ops. Report of a fifty-five-year-old male at the Arrivals Reception Lobby throwing luggage around. He's non-white. Has dark hair and a white coat."
Millington's supervisor at the YVR subdetachment hears the back-and-forth. Corporal Monty Robinson is in another part of the building talking to one of the civilian volunteers who help the police do licence-plate checks. It's rare that Robinson leaves the building to go out on a call. As he listens, he decides to accompany them, and see how they handle themselves.
Like the other Mounties, Millington is wearing his Sam Browne — a heavy, leather belt, supported by a thinner strap slung over one shoulder running diagonally across the chest. It's named after a British Army captain who lost an arm in the Indian Rebellion of 1857. He came up with the modification to his belt so he could continue to use a sword and scabbard. Millington and his contemporaries can carry ten to fifteen pounds of gear on their modern Sam Brownes. Everything from handcuffs and flashlights to their side arms.
Tonight, Millington is also carrying a weapon the inventor of his belt could never have imagined. Millington has one of the subdetachment's two new Tasers. A few months ago, they all had training on the stun gun. They were taught that it is not only safe, but less harmful than a baton or pepper spray. In the little over two years since graduating from the RCMP Academy, known colloquially as Depot, Millington has used none of his weapons, including the Taser, outside of training. Hours ago, at the start of his shift, Millington signed out the new device. To make sure it was working, he did a "spark test": he removed the cartridge at the front of the Taser's barrel containing the steel probes and wires that deliver the current. Once the device was unloaded, Millington pulled the trigger and watched a blue bolt of electricity arc across the gun's electrodes.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Blamed and Broken"
by .
Copyright © 2018 Curt Petrovich.
Excerpted by permission of Dundurn Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Foreword 9
Preface 13
1 Why Are the Police Not Here? 19
2 Welcome to Canada 27
3 The Cowboys Ride In 33
4 The Phone Call 51
5 Suspects 57
6 Cover-Up 71
7 Grief 76
8 The Camera Doesn't Lie 84
9 In the Eye of the Storm 98
10 All In 109
11 A Mother's Hope 116
12 From Bad to Worse 124
13 Lawyer Up 130
14 That's How It Is Gerry Rundel 137
15 Cops and Robbers Bill Bentley 150
16 Trial by Fire Kwesi Millington 157
17 Out of Control Monty Robinson 165
18 Dirty Questions 173
19 Liars and Cowards 186
20 Red Serge and Silence 197
21 Testing the Evidence Bentleys Trial 205
22 The Last Honourable Day 212
23 Political Prosecution 229
24 Tunnel Vision 243
25 The Meaning of "High" Millington's Trial 249
28 Twelve Steps Robinson's Trial 261
27 Making the Facts Fit Rondels Trial 270
28 Guilty If Proven Innocent 280
20 Fighting Back 297
30 Justice 323
Afterword 336
Acknowledgements 345
Image Credits 348
Index 349
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