RCMP Watch

Peter O’Neil, Gliwice, Poland (CanWest News Service) - A vodka bottle lies on the floor beside a coffee table featuring a half-eaten breast of chicken, an overflowing ashtray, and large photographs of Robert Dziekanski’s final hysterical moments before dying in the grip of Taser-wielding Mounties.

Widow Elzbieta Dubon, grief-stricken throughout her first interview with the Canadian media, manages a faint smile when asked what Canada meant to her common-law husband of eight years.

The smile somehow brightens and warms a pasty, alcohol- and nicotine-abused face that could be the visage of someone two decades older.

“Make sure he knows that I am smiling,” Dubon, 46, said to a Polish interpreter while she nodded to a Canadian journalist.

“When Robert left he told me, ‘Ella, if I go to the Rocky Mountains, and if I see a grizzly bear, I will walk up to it and kiss it.’”

She said he kept a Canadian flag above the door to their tiny bedroom, but gave it to a friend before leaving for Canada.

The smile was brief.  Then she stood, pulled the interpreter and journalist to her and moaned incomprehensible words of sorrow into their chests.

Dubon somehow ignored two friends outside, both severely intoxicated, who banged on her door shouting “Ella! ELLA!!” for most of the hour-long interview.

Dubon described Dziekanski, 40, as a “great man” and an animal lover who adored his mother, was respected by friends, and had a “fanatic” passion for geography.

She said she may have joined Dziekanski in Kamloops, even though others have said he went to live with his mother to escape a toxic existence in the ground floor of this derelict century-old apartment building.

Dubon’s tiny $77-a-month flat is warmed only by a single electric heater with red-hot coils dangerously exposed next to a wall peeling as a result of water damage.

Then she looked at the photographs. “He looks like a terrorist in these pictures, but he was scared,” she explained.

“Robert was at a breaking point. He could show his desperation in no other way. He wanted someone to help him.”

Dubon’s analysis, while rambling and alcohol-blurred, was in many ways consistent with that of one of Poland’s best-known psychiatrists.

Stanislaw Telesniski, who specializes in courtroom testimony in nearby Krakow, told CanWest that Dziekanski was obviously weakened by fatigue, hunger, fear, nicotine deprivation, and panic over an inability to speak any English.

“All those things make the self-defence system weaker,” said Telesniski, who analyzed the video for TVN-24, Poland’s largest private television network.

“And you’re starting to be more intuitive, like an animal. And after a while you feel you are surrounded by animals, because your rational way of thinking has been stopped because of stress.

“In that state of mind there is a disintegration of your personality, and you start to be aggressive and irrational, behaving in a way no one around you can understand.

“And aggression is one of the ways of communicating to people and showing the sign that something’s wrong with you.”

He said the four burly RCMP officers made a fundamental mistake when they approached him aggressively and almost immediately sent jolts of electricity through his adrenalin-charged body.

“They should have been trained to deal with this situation, and the first rule is to become his friend as fast as possible, and not increase his stress more and more. Make him calm.”

Most Poles interviewed in a shopping mall in the nearby city of Katowice, in the heart of Poland’s once powerful coal-mining industry about 70 kilometres north of the Czech Republic, agreed that the police were brutally quick.

Several also said the incident has affected their previous view of Canada as a peaceful country.

“You expect something like that in America, but not in Canada,” said Adrian Wawrzynczak, 31, a clothing store manager.

Radislaw Shupensky, a 28-year-old salesman, was harshly critical of the Mounties but noted that a Brazilian man was mistakenly shot dead by London police  after the subway terror bombings there.

“Everybody is afraid of terrorists.”

Dubon said the police asked Dziekanski’s mother why his suitcase was packed with geography books and atlases.

“It was because those textbooks were his life,” she said.

Dziekanski couldn’t bear to be not close to animals and regularly brought her house pets home. Once it was a parrot, which she gave away because it frightened her, and once a rabbit.

On their relationship, she said: “We were very much together. He couldn’t imagine another woman in front of him.”

“The only other woman who could be in front of him was his mother.”