Robert Dziekanski had no drugs or alcohol in his system

October 27, 2007
PATRICK BRETHOUR, The Globe and Mail

VANCOUVER -- Robert Dziekanski had no alcohol or drugs in his system when he died after being tasered by police at Vancouver International Airport, his family's lawyer says.

Mr. Dziekanski was acting erratically after being delayed more than 10 hours at the Vancouver airport - it still is not clear why - with police saying he was yelling, sweating profusely, behaving irrationally, throwing chairs, tipping his luggage cart over, and pounding on windows.

But toxicology tests on samples taken from Mr. Dziekanski's remains were negative, said lawyer Walter Kosteckyj. British Columbia's Coroner Service provided those results to the family, but is not making them public. The RCMP is not releasing the information either, saying it does not want to impede its investigation.

A preliminary autopsy did not uncover any anatomical cause of death, either trauma or disease, meaning there is no clear medical picture of why Mr. Dziekanski stopped breathing and died within a few minutes of being repeatedly tasered in the early morning hours of Oct. 14.

The RCMP say he was tasered twice, but a witness has said she saw police use tasers four times.

Police have said that three officers attempted to speak to Mr. Dziekanski, but that he ignored them and attempted to grab an item off a desk. However, Mr. Kosteckyj said on Thursday that police waited just 24 seconds before tasering the 40-year-old man, and that he did not appear to pose a danger to anybody.

The police have said that Mr. Dziekanski continued to struggle after being tasered, but Mr. Kosteckyj questioned that assertion yesterday, saying his muscles may have been contracting as a result of the taser blasts.

Resolving that discrepancy, along with the number of taser blasts, could prove to be pivotal. According to Dr. John Butt, a pathologist and former chief coroner for Nova Scotia, repeated taser shocks could exhaust a person's chest muscles and cause him or her to stop breathing.

That exhaustion, formally termed tetany, is not detectible at autopsy, he said. But if Mr. Dziekanski continued to struggle after being tasered, it is not likely that the shocks triggered tetany, Dr. Butt said.

But Mr. Kosteckyj said the notion that Mr. Dziekanski died from muscle exhaustion brought on by repeated taser strikes "makes perfect sense."

RCMP guidelines for the use of tasers allow multiple strikes. Only about one in five taser strikes connect properly with a target subject, RCMP Corporal Greg Gillis said. Multiple strikes increase the chances of subduing a person, he said.

Jeff Dolan, B.C.'s assistant deputy chief coroner, said a full coroner's report will not be ready for a considerable time, likely weeks.

CTV News reported on Thursday that, based on emergency radio logs, police arrived at the scene at 1:28 a.m. and two minutes later, it was reported that a "male has been tasered."

The radio log does not say when police approached Mr. Dziekanski. But it does indicate that he was down two minutes after they arrived, and that he lost consciousness two minutes after that.

CTV reported there was a 12-minute delay before medical help arrived.

Mr. Kosteckyj said it appears likely that Mr. Dziekanski's family will sue, although it is not clear who will be the target of any lawsuit. "I'm sure there's going to be more than one defendant."

EDITORIAL: Time to recognize the risks of tasers

October 23, 2007
Globe and Mail

If Canadian police officers had fired a revolver at Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport and at Quilem Registre on the streets of Montreal, and killed them, people would have been outraged. After all, while each man may have been out of control, neither one posed a serious danger to anybody. But when police used a taser, not a regular gun, and both men died, the outrage was muted because of a belief, repeated again yesterday by Robert Lafrenière, Quebec's deputy public security minister, that tasers do not kill.

But they do. Here is one way: The person shot develops tetany, a physiological condition of muscular exhaustion. It can lead to death by respiratory paralysis, John Butt, a forensic pathologist in British Columbia who does private consulting in Canada and the United States, explained in an interview yesterday.

Dr. Butt is not opposed to taser use, within limits. When he served on a committee of the B.C. Police Complaints Commission that examined taser use two years ago, the committee urged that jolts from the stun gun not be given too quickly in succession because rapid use might contribute to tetany. Mr. Dziekanski was shot twice, say the RCMP (four times, says an independent witness). In Montreal, officers jolted Mr. Registre an unknown number of times (his sister says six times). Of the six Canadians who died in 2005 and 2006 after being shot by police tasers, all were shot more than once, according to Amnesty International Canada.

The death of the Polish-speaking Mr. Dziekanski was horrifying and seemingly avoidable. He had reportedly travelled five hours on a bus in Poland and 13 hours on a plane, and then been held at Canadian customs and immigration for some hours. He couldn't find his mother, who had waited 10 hours for him in vain. He was lost and no one understood him. He began shouting and throwing computers. The mind boggles that humanity is smart enough to invent the taser but unable to think up a way to intervene in this fraught situation without killing the man.

There's a bit of semantics at play, too. Police in Canada say tasers do not directly cause death. The question should be, however, whether a taser used (often more than once) on a person in a state of delirium, and followed up by severe restraint, may cause death. The answer is that, in just 4½ years, 17 people who were tasered in Canada have died. Death might not have come directly, but it came - far too often.

There is also a crucial flaw in the police logic (and the logic of some medical experts) around taser use. The police say when someone is in a wild, irrational state of delirium, he might die even when not tasered. What they mean is that (apart from the occasional death from the delirium itself) the death occurs after a neck restraint, hog-tying or asphyxia caused when police officers put their knees on the person's chest. The police defend tasers by arguing that they are no more dangerous than other restraints. But does that mean tasers are safe? Of course not.

Would Mr. Dziekanski have died if he had not been tasered? (An autopsy did not reveal why he died; further tests are scheduled.) How about the other 16 over the past 4½ years? Any doubt should weigh heavily against taser use in all but those situations where it is an alternative to lethal force, such as firearms. Until we know the answer, police need much stricter limits on taser use. It should be a last-resort alternative to deadly force.