A journey interrupted
A tragic occurrence at the Vancouver International Airport about a month ago.
Robert Dziekanski was emigrating from Poland to Canada. He didn't speak a word of English, his Mother was there at the airport to meet him. And things went to hell with Mr. Dziekanski being tasered by the RCMP and dying from this treatment.
In the days following this tragedy, what happened wasn't clear.
Now it is and it is not good.
Canada's
National Post has a good writeup of the story:
A dream of a new life gone horribly wrong
Robert Dziekanski was born an only child in Bielawa, a small town of 30,000 in the southwestern corner of Poland that is within sight of the Sowie Mountains, which divide his home country from the Czech Republic.
He would never cross that border, or any other, until he was 40 and left Poland to join his mother in distant Canada, his bags packed with geography books that had long sustained his unfulfilled world fascination, his pockets empty of the cigarettes he had discarded in favour of healthier beginnings.
His baggage is today all that remains of his immigration to Canada and it, almost more than anything else, speaks to the dreams that brought him to what was to be his new country.
And then things went south:
A day later Mr. Dziekanski landed in Vancouver and walked up to the primary inspection row of customs agents, showing no signs of anything abnormal, according to officials at the Vancouver Airport Authority who have reviewed surveillance videos. He did not speak any English but by about 4 p.m. had cleared customs and entered the baggage hall.
And:
All that is known is that Mr. Dziekanski was there for a very long time. Less than 100 metres away, his mother was waiting, too. She was, in the words of her lawyer Walter Kosteckyj, "just basically hyper-excited to see her son."
As her son was clearing primary inspection, the anxious mother made her first trip to an arrivals-level information desk to inquire about her son. She was told the immigration process often caused delays, and that she needn't worry yet. So she waited.
As the hours passed, she returned to the information desk at least twice more and, finally, asked to speak with a supervisor. She was told to go up an escalator to a departures-level info desk.
Somewhere between 7 p.m. and 8 p.m., she convinced one of the information officers to page her son, but the officer mispronounced his name so poorly she worried he would not understand his own name. Despite asking, she was not allowed to speak over the PA system herself. Even had she been given the microphone, however, her words would not have reached his ears, because the public address system did not broadcast into the customs hall where he was waiting.
As she sought help at the information desks, the man who drove her to Vancouver -- who spoke fluent English -- walked into a customs and immigration area to ask whether anyone there could help. He learned nothing.
Two hours later, at 9:30 p.m., he returned, picked up a phone and again spoke to an official. It is unclear who he spoke to, but according to Mr. Kosteckyj, the lawyer, he was told: "I can tell you that there's no Polish immigrant here tonight."
And:
It was becoming clear to Ms. Cisowski that her son was not there. At 10 p.m., she approached an information desk for at least the sixth time. With no new information, and with the signal from an official that her son was not there, she decided he must have somehow missed his flight. She left the airport, and set out for her four-hour drive home.
She could not have known that minutes after she left, her son's wait finally ended when he presented himself to secondary inspection officials, who helped him with his luggage. Two hours later, according to the official account, he cleared immigration.
Someone had communicated with him well enough to process him as a new immigrant. Yet as he left the secure area more than nine hours after touching down in Vancouver, he remained alone and helpless.
At about 1:15 a.m., he began to grow erratic--opening and closing the automatic door that divides the two areas. He was sweating. He threw a folding table, then a computer.
At 1:20 a.m., airport operations received two reports about his behaviour. Five minutes later, security officials arrived. The four RCMP officers came shortly after. The video of their arrival shows them walking past the airport's Clayoquot carved wooden figures, whose outstretched arms of welcome Mr. Dziekanski never reached.
He calls for police and, according to Polish speakers who have seen the video, threatens to sue.
About twenty-five seconds after one of the officers asks, "How are you doing, sir?" Mr. Dziekanski is hit with the first 50,000-volt jolt from the Taser. He screams. Less than a minute after RCMP first approach him, he grows silent. Not long after, he is pronounced dead.
A subsequent toxicology report found no drugs or alcohol in his system. So what triggered his bizarre conduct? Ms. Krupak, the Polish-Canadian reporter, suggests it may have been an attempt to get a response from the police he believed would help him. Ludwik Tokarczuk, president of the Canadian Polish Conference, says any normal person in his condition would have reacted the same way.
"He was without sleep, without food because he couldn't probably ask for any food. He was without cigarettes, and in withdrawal from nicotine," he said.
In an especially cruel twist, Ms. Cisowski herself would not find out about any of her son's actions that night until many hours later. She arrived home at 2 a.m. to find a message waiting: "It's Canada Immigration calling, Vancouver International Airport for Zofia. Well, we're expecting her to be here, I guess, picking up her relative. If she is not, you can return this call."
She did, and half an hour later reached someone who told her that her son was waiting for her. Mr. Dziekanski had at this time already been dead for an hour. But that is not what Ms. Cisowski was told. She took a bus and arrived in the afternoon, and it was not until then that she was confronted with the horrible news.
In his eulogy at a memorial service today, Jurek Baltakis, a leader in the Kamloops Polish community, will remember that act as a mother's heart-wrenching bid to leave her only son--a man whose death seems so remarkably stupid -- with a gift so "he can make his last trip to eternity and remember that he was a Polish- Canadian."
Good Lord -- I hope that some very highly placed heads roll on this one.
It would have been obvious that this person did not speak English and they should have had an interpreter available -- even on the telephone -- to help him along and to find out that his mother was waiting for him.
I can understand the need for security but there is good unobtrusive security and there is ham-handed stupidity. This tragedy is a perfect example of the latter...
Posted by DaveH at November 20, 2007 9:50 PM