The cold, wet death of Frank Joseph Paul

The Republic looks again at a case that the coroner should have investigated long ago, and might now have to, following recommendations by the police complaints commissioner

by Reed Eurchuk <reurchuk@republic-news.org>

Current police complaints commissioner Dirk Ryneveld has recently urged that the provincial Attorney General hold a public inquiry, and that the Chief Coroner hold a full inquest, into the death of Frank Joseph Paul. The Republic republishes this article in order to emphsize Mr Ryneveld's call and in hopes that justice be done in the memory of Mr Paul.

The death in Vancouver of a native man in December 1998 has only now become public knowledge thanks to a provincial legislative review of the Office of the Police Complaints Commissioner [OPCC].

Frank Joseph Paul, a Micmac native living in Vancouver, came to police attention twice on December 5, 1998. The first time he was drunk in a public place and taken to jail where he was held in the cells for a number of hours and then re-released onto the streets. Later the same day, another policeman came upon Paul apparently unconscious on the street and unable to move, and took Paul to back to the police station. At the station, the Sergeant in charge of the cells refused to place Paul in custody, because he felt Paul was not drunk, but suffering from a medical condition.

In his testimony before the legislative review, Dana Urban, who was the OPCC's counsel at the time, gave a vivid description of Mr Paul's condition, based on a video created from police station cameras. The video "graphically shows the paddy wagon coming in and Mr Paul being taken out of the paddy wagon . . . and being dragged, like a sack of garbage or a carcass, all the way down the hallway to the elevator, leaving a clear, definite, distinct, unmistakable wet mark." Urban emphasized, as did others, that Paul "didn't make a movement . . . not a blink of an eye, not a finger, nothing."

After deciding not to hold Paul at the jail, the Sergeant commanded a constable to "breach" Paul, that is, to relocate him outside the area in which he had been picked up. To his credit, the constable attempted to take Frank Paul to Vancouver's detoxification unit. He arrived there with Paul and another man, but for some reason, perhaps because there was no more space at the detox, Paul did not enter the detox unit. Instead, the constable drove his paddy wagon into the alley placed the man against an alley wall.

A passerby found Paul dead in this same alley in the early hours of December 6th.

As part of its investigation, the OPCC brought in a forensic pathologist, Dr Rex Ferris. Ferris's report stated, that "there seems no doubt that he [Paul] was suffering from hypothermia when he was removed from the jail" and "It is my opinion that at the time of his discharge from the police jail, Mr Paul was totally incapable of caring for himself."

Iced corpse / Hot potato

The discovery of the dead man's cold body triggered a long chain of institutional responses. In his testimony, OPCC investigator Bill Macdonald gave a chronology of the institutional responses to the death. Besides the OPCC, the regional coroner, the regional crown counsel, two sections of the Vancouver Police Department [VPD], the director of Legal Services of the criminal justice branch, and the Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General all responded or considered various responses to the death. These institutions were involved at separate times over a period of more than three years, from the day of Paul's death, when the VPD major crime section commenced an investigation, to January of 2002, when according to Macdonald, the file was concluded at OPCC.

The product of all this work was slim. The VPD suspended the constable for a single day, the sergeant for two days. One of the two officers had some sort of training around handling intoxicated people. There was a reconsideration of how police will in the future handle similar situations.

In his testimony, Matthew Adie gave an illustration of the kind of hair splitting, specious reasoning engaged in at times by some of the institutions involved. "The coroner is required to order a public inquest in cases where someone dies in police custody," Adie explained. "The grey area here is that the coroner had decided that this man had not died in police custody. He had died after he had been in police custody, and the two events were not connected."

Why the intense institutional anxiety about the case? First, of course, is the obvious fact that the man died needlessly. The police could have sought medical attention for Paul. There is a nurse at the jail. Larger than the needless death, in my opinion, loomed the fact that the man was a Native man, and that together with the time frame in which all this occurred, gave this death possible political overtones.

Saskatoon casts a shadow on Vancouver

On January 29th, 2000, five full months before the OPCC investigator Bill MacDonald began his review of the circumstances surrounding Paul's death, a jogger in Saskatoon came across the frozen corpse of a native man, Rodney Naistus. He had died after spending a night outside and being exposed to the eight degrees below zero temperatures. The very next night police picked up another native man, Lawrence Wegner, following a disturbance in that city. Four days later his frozen body was found on the outskirts of town, roughly in the same area as Naistus. On February 3, 2000, a third native man, Darrell Night, filed a complaint with the Saskatoon police. He complained that police had picked him up on January 29, 2000, and transported him to the same general area as where the two bodies had been found, where they removed his jacket and forced him out of their car into the frigid 17 degrees below zero night.

The events in Saskatoon attracted intense media attention in Canada, in the US, and around the world. Amnesty International followed it.

When MacDonald began his review, in late June 2000, the events in Saskatoon impressed a number of employees at OPCC with their parallels. Adie, MacDonald and Urban each refer to the Saskatoon events in their testimony, at times obliquely, at times directly. Urban drew the connection most passionately: "look at the import of the facts in the Saskatoon case. . . . You had a first nations person who was taken into custody by police and thrown into the back of the police car. The first nations person was obnoxious and violent, and the police . . . dumped him in bad weather. If you're soaking wet and can't move, is placing you out in the rain in two degrees Celsius weather really any different from what the Saskatoon police did with this man, who was totally able to look after himself, absent the subzero temperatures that he was dumped in, in the middle of nowhere?

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