Street Level

Editor's note: Video that shows the final moments of Robert Dziekanski's life will be released to the media Wednesday afternoon, with an embargo on publication until 6 p.m. KTW will have the video on this website as soon as possible. In the meantime, KTW spoke with Paul Pritchard, the Victoria man who captured the tragic scene.

By Dale Bass

Paul Pritchard was flying home to Victoria — a place he left seven years ago — to spend time with his ailing father.

Instead, he stepped directly into a media maelstrom, videotaping the last minutes of the life of Robert Dziekanski.

Were it not for a missed flight in San Francisco, Pritchard, 25, wouldn’t have been at Vancouver International Airport on Oct. 14, trying to catch some sleep in the customs and immigration area he had entered after finally arriving back in Canada from China.

Pritchard was trying to ignore Dziekanski, at the time nothing more than “a foreign man slapping his hand on the glass trying to get back in” the immigration area he had just left.

The next thing Pritchard heard were arguments.

“So I got up and got a better seat,” he told KTW. “It sounds awful to say it now, but at the time, it was, well, like entertainment. It was something to watch.”

A man, later identified as Lorne Meltzer, a corporate valet at the airport to pick up a client, used his access card to let Dziekanski back into the secured glassed-in area.

At some point, Pritchard said, he began taping the incident with his digital camera. He said he’s not sure why he did it, but he’s glad he did because police have said it’s likely the best evidence of the final minutes of Dziekanski’s life.

Pritchard said it was obvious the Polish construction worker, who was coming to Kamloops to live with his mother, was trying to get help.

“You can see it on the tape, the deep breathing, sweating. He just looked scared. You could see he was trying to get someone’s attention.

“He was walking back and forth. He was picking things up, putting them down. Then two security officers came and we thought it was the police and we said, ‘Leave him alone. He’s just scared,” because by then he was barricaded behind chairs. And he was almost like he was happy the police were there.”

At some point, four RCMP officers showed up and, said Pritchard, they can be heard asking if they should use their tasers.

The tape shows the four officers, two security guards and an unidentified man in a suit making a semi-circle around Dziekanski, who put up his hands “almost in defeat, shrugs his shoulders and takes two steps, speaking in Polish. Then you see them taser him and there’s this blood-curdling scream that just keeps going on and on.”

Three officers jump on Dziekanski, by then lying on the floor writhing in pain, Pritchard said, and there is talk of using the taser again.

“I don’t actually see them hit him again . . . but after I got the tape back [from RCMP, who had borrowed it and at one point refused to return it], I saw one of the officers handling him was using his shin and knee to pin [Dziekanski’s] head against the ground. And there were four of them on him. And it wasn’t just for a little bit. They kept him like that a long time.”

The man in the suit checked Dziekanski’s pulse, said something to the RCMP, “and they just looked up in the air. And I remember thinking ‘This is an airport. What the hell just happened here?’”

After several minutes, paramedics arrived and started CPR immediately, which has also caused Pritchard to wonder why none of the officers or security guards were doing CPR before this.

“What? His heart stopped beating the second the medics got there?” Pritchard said.

With the first bus for the ferry not leaving the airport until almost 5:30 a.m., Pritchard said he didn’t mind remaining there while police started their investigation, taking statements and gathering evidence.

“I was willing to do it,” he said. “I was definitely on the cops’ side then.

“But not anymore. Not after I saw what I saw.”

Up to the point whenDziekanski was let back into the glassed-in area by the corporate valet, there had been no problems, according to Walter Kosteckyj, the lawyer representing Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski of Kamloops.

“He was not a problem on the plane,” Kosteckyj said. “He arrived at customs [from his Poland homeland] at about 4 p.m., which is a reasonable hour. He went through customs. He was no problem from 4 p.m. until about 10:30 p.m., and even then, he wasn’t really more than an annoyance.”

Dziekanski, who spoke no English and had never flown before, “bumbled his way to immigration by about 10:30 p.m., and was processed by 12:30 a.m.,” Kosteckyj said.

Even at this point, with no idea where his mother was, Kosteckyj said Dziekanski “was not in a rage. He was not ramping up. He was not causing a problem.”

What Dziekanski didn’t know, the lawyer said, was that Cisowski had spent hours on the other side of the secured immigration area trying to find someone to help her get a message to her son. And, after almost 10 hours of receiving no help, and being told her son was not there, she went home to Kamloops, only to discover the following morning he had been tasered by RCMP and was dead.

Kosteckyj wants to know why Cisowski couldn’t get anyone to help her.

“If you have a business like this where you’re expecting people to come and meet other people, even people who don’t speak English, you would think you’d have a way to do it,” he said.

Kosteckyj also wonders, in this post-Sept. 11, 2001 world, why no one did anything when Dziekanski’s luggage remained on the carousel unattended for so long that Lufthansa personnel finally took possession of it.

Posted by Dale at 6:44 p.m. Comments