Street Level

by DALE BASS
Staff reporter

Jurek Baltakis addressed the overflow crowd at Kamloops Funeral Home.

He spoke just a few words, and about a dozen people raised their right hand.

It was a telling moment.

“I just told you in Polish to raise your right hand,” he said. “And most of you didn’t know what I was saying.”

It was an experiment, Baltakis said, to show how vital communication is to people – and how hopeless the man he was there to eulogize, Robert Dziekanski, must have felt during his last few minutes of life before he was tasered and died on the floor of Vancouver International Airport on October. 14.

The Polish construction worker had just taken his first flight, spending 15 hours travelling from Poland to Vancouver, where he was to meet his mother, Zofia Cisowski.

He arrived, made it through the first checkpoint and for reasons YVR officials have not explained, spent another 10 hours in a second secured area, with no access to food or water, and where no officials provided any help. Minutes before RCMP arrived, he had begun throwing things and blocking the doors, sparking some to call for security and one man, Paul Pritchard of Victoria, to record the four officers surrounding Dziekanski, giving him orders in English – after being told he didn’t speak the language – and, 23 seconds after confronting him, tasering him.

Baltakis, who told KTW he was both nervous about speaking and afraid his “experiment” would seem ridiculous, said most Canadians don’t understand how frightening it can be arriving here for the first time, unable to understand what is being said to them.

Add to that the unimaginable fear Dziekanski must have felt after spending those hours waiting for his mother – not knowing she was just outside the secure area immigrants must go through – and it’s a story that haunts the man who was in the same position two decades ago, arriving in a new country, hoping for a new life.

The celebration of Dziekanski’s life attracted national attention.

It was witnessed by hundreds of people, many of them strangers to the man who died after he was tasered by RCMP. The 250 seats in the chapel were full long before the 11 a.m. service began Saturday; the overflow sat in adjacent rooms, stood in hallways and listened through the audio system in a reception area.

Through it all, Cisowski, sat in a front pew, surrounded by family and friends, her eyes almost swollen shut from the crying she said she cannot staunch. Afterward, she spoke to the media in the funeral home parking lot, thanking everyone for coming to remember her “beautiful boy.”

The service, donated by the funeral home, featured music by Blue Moon, a local acoustic quartet, and speeches from Maciej Krych, consul-general of Poland, and Danuta Tokarczyk, president of the Polish Canadian Kongres in B.C.

Then Trudy Dirk, former executive director of the Kamloops Immigrant Services, took the microphone and talked of meeting Cisowski eight years ago when she, too, was an immigrant, arriving in Kamloops from her native Poland.

Dirk talked of how Cisowski worked two jobs, learned to speak English, saved money to buy a car, passed a driver’s licence test and made plans to open a cleaning business – all to bring her only son from Poland to Canada to start a new life.

Later, Riki Bagnell spoke of how she feels forever linked with Cisowski. Her son – also named Robert – died after being tasered twice in 2004. She said seeing the community and national support Cisowski was receiving at the ceremony had left her feeling some comfort since her son died.

Afterward, she told KTW how amazed she was at the way Kamloops residents had come together to show their support for Cisowski and their anger about the way her son died. Bagnell said she and her daughter, Patti Gillman, felt they had to attend, especially after she saw the videotape of Dziekanski’s death.

“I’ve been haunted by a vision of how [her son] must have suffered in the last minutes of his life and after I saw that tape, I realized how horrible it really was for him.”

Bagnell, who lives in Prince Edward Island, and her daughter, who lives in Belleville, Ont., have campaigned since the death for an independent review of tasers, a weapon she said is marketed as not being lethal but which has caused almost 300 deaths in North America in the past six years.

Posted by Dale at 5:07 p.m. Comments