James Keller, Vancouver, B.C. (Canadian Press) – Vancouver International Airport, where Robert Dziekanski spent the last 10 hours of his life lost, confused and unable to communicate with anyone before his fatal confrontation with RCMP, has denied any responsibility for his death in its defence of a lawsuit filed by the Polish immigrant’s mother.
Dziekanski died on the floor of the airport’s international arrivals area in the early morning of Oct. 14, 2007, after four RCMP officers stunned him with a Taser.
His mother is now suing the officers, the airport and the federal and provincial governments.
Zofia Cisowski alleges the airport and its staff failed her son at every encounter they had with the man after he arrived from Poland and then tried, unsuccessfully, to find his waiting mother.
He was in the airport for nearly 10 hours before police were called, including several hours that he spent unnoticed in a secure customs hall, possibly sleeping.
In particular, Cisowski’s lawsuit says airport staff didn’t do enough to help Dziekanski when he became agitated and started throwing furniture, prompting calls to police.
She claims airport officials didn’t provide sufficient access to a translator and wrongly decided not to call the facility’s own firefighters after Dziekanski was stunned and lying unconscious on the airport floor.
The lawsuit also says staff failed to provide Cisowski with any “meaningful assistance” when she repeatedly tried to find out where her son was during hours of waiting.
The airport denies every allegation.
Airport staff “followed their training, used good judgment and employed the resources available to them at the time to do their best to assist the plaintiff (Cisowski), Mr. Dziekanski and all members of the public in attendance at the airport,” says the statement of defence, filed on Nov. 20.
“If the plaintiff sustained any injury or harm, such harm was not foreseeable by the airport or its representatives.”
Cisowski’s lawyer declined to comment, saying he was waiting for statements of defence from the others named in the lawsuit. The airport is the only defendant so far to file such a statement.
The airport’s lawyer, Dwight Stewart, said the airport has extensively reviewed what happened and made changes, but he insisted the airport’s policies and procedures were sufficient at the time.
“This was a situation that no one at the airport had ever encountered before,” Stewart said in an interview.
“And while it’s unlikely that this would ever again happen at the airport, the airport looked at every one of those systems and did everything it could to ensure that . . . every passenger – no matter the time of day, no matter their experience with international air travel, no matter their language capacity – had a smooth passage through Vancouver International Airport.”
Stewart said he can’t legally discuss whether there has been any talk of a settlement, but he said the airport is sticking firm in its position that it did nothing wrong.
The airport faced intense criticism after Dziekanski’s death and made numerous changes in the aftermath, including improved access to translation services, more signs in different languages and increased patrols to find passengers who are lost or in distress.
An internal report produced in the months after Dziekanski’s fatal confrontation with police concluded airport staff followed their training and did nothing wrong, but made more than two dozen recommendations that have been put into place.
At a public inquiry that wrapped up in October, the airport repeatedly pointed to those changes as proof it had learned from the incident, while at the same time denying there was anything wrong in the first place.
Inquiry commissioner Thomas Braidwood’s final report is expected to be released next year, and it will contain recommendations to prevent similar deaths.
The inquiry also focused on the actions of federal border officers who dealt with Dziekanski before he encountered the police and the four RCMP officers, one of whom used a Taser on Dziekanski within seconds of arriving.
Cisowski’s lawsuit is just one of several legal cases connected to Dziekanski’s death and the inquiry.
Three of the officers will be in the B.C. Court of Appeal this week to challenge the inquiry’s authority to make findings of misconduct against them; Taser International is suing the inquiry commissioner over the findings of an earlier report that concluded the weapons can kill; and the officer who fired the Taser, Const. Kwesi Millington, is suing the CBC for libel.
You’re going to read out of it what you want, and based on your comments to every single article, you’re going to find fault with the RCMP on everything, regardless of what the incident was. They do it one way, it’s wrong, they do it the other way, it’s wrong. The most vocal people are often the ones who sit at a desk all day with their rose coloured glasses on who have never even come close to being in a similar position, and who never will. It’s not like television, superstar. When you cause the police to attend as a result of your actions, there is always a risk involved. Best way to avoid that risk… don’t commit crimes.
Again, I didn’t say he was entirely at fault, I said he shares blame in this and was not entirely innocent. Any time something like this happens, the “victim” is portrayed as an angel in the media and any part he played in his own demise is severely downplayed, glossed over and forgotten.
He was “misunderstood,” “just turning his life around,” etc. “Such a good boy!” How many times do we see that in every one of these types of deaths.. And the family clutches a photo of their poor, misunderstood relative with a little halo painted on. Bull shit. Dziekanski was a raging alcoholic on welfare with mental issues..who served federal time for armed robbery. He certainly was no angel. He didn’t deserve to die, but he could have easily also prevented the whole encounter. He is not innocent in any of this. Blame everyone else though.. it’s very in style these days. You did nothing wrong.
In Poland the police dress in army fatigues and openly carry machine guns in the airport. I dare you to go and pull the same stunt over there and see how it plays out.
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Not only is there a very clear implication in your cruel words that Mr. Dziekanski bears responsibility for his own death by not learning English…reread your own post if you like…but you also gratuitously heap insult on the dead with a non sequitur about Polish welfare. Only in the hyper-critical and clearly persecution complected world of the neo-con does such anger and derision with the poor and the disadvantaged find such perfect expression.
But wait, it gets even better. In the urge to heap more abuse on the dead you invent from whole cloth, drivel about him threatening to sue the authorities. You have no knowledge of that but you put it out there to what…abuse him more in the exercise of your antipathy toward a person who deserved better from Canadian authorities?
No, that’s not my opinion. It’s the finding of the RCMP Complaints Commissioner. Try taking some personal responsibility yourself and admit what is clear to so many…he deserved not to die. And he deserves better than to be abused in his grave by you. For shame.
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I don’t think I said he deserved to die because he didn’t learn English. I said it’s not Vancouver Airport’s fault that he was unable to communicate with anyone and sat around for hours. The whole situation could have been avoided if Mr. Dziekanski had prepared himself in the years he had to do so. He was not innocent in this whole matter either.
At least he got his final wish though. When he is smashing furniture and screaming, I’m sure you realize that he’s yelling that he’s going to smash everything and sue everyone. It’s nice that his final wish was carried out and his family is suing everyone.
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Big deal. I can get myself out of a wet paper bag in Germany too. But you miss the point mein kleiner freund.
It matters not a tick or a toss what you or I think about the case. Frankly, it matters little what the airport authority thinks either. Or for that matter, what Zofia Cisowski believes. But it matters a great deal what the court thinks and how it rules. And that’s the point…so heuschrecke, as the Zen master so wisely observed…you guessed it…we’ll see.
And not for nothing, there are a at least a few around who think failure to learn English might not be quite a good enough reason to kill someone. The nerve! And blaming the dead guy might be a tad cruel…or is it insensitive…there are a number of choices. Make sense of that!
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So it’s everyone else’s fault.. shocking. This guy had 8 years to learn a few words of english or french while he was sitting at home on his duff on the polish equivalent of welfare, waiting to get the thumbs up to come here.
Everyone else should not have to accommodate you.. you should take responsibility for yourself. I go on vacation for 2 weeks to Germany and I learn enough German to get myself out of a wet paper bag.
I think it’s ridiculous to blame the airport. He got stuck there because HE couldn’t communicate as a result of HIS lack of preparation. Millions of people have come through Vancouver airport just fine. This whole thing could have been prevented. Too bad personal responsibility went out the window with common sense.
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I enjoyed the line about the Zen master told by Gust Avrokatos, ably played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman, in “Charlie Wilson’s War”, for two reasons. I really liked Hoffman’s character and I also thought the parable a worthy one with application elsewhere. This might be one of those “elsewheres”.
In the film Gust tells tells Wilson a little parable about a Zen master. In a village, a boy got a pony, and all the villagers said, “That’s good.” The Zen master said, “We’ll see.” A couple of years later, the boy fell off the pony and broke his leg. All the villagers said, “That’s too bad.” The Zen master said, “We’ll see.” Then a war came and all the other young men went to war, but the boy couldn’t because of his leg. All the villagers said, “That’s good.” The Zen master said, “We’ll see.”
So the Vancouver Airport Authority says (I’m paraphrasing here but you get the point) ‘Not Guilty!. Blameless! Nothing to do with us! Too bad but not our fault!’.
Well, that was predictable. Would one really expect them to say anything else? Do we anticipate they would just roll over and say ‘Yeah, you got us, we did it…what’s more we want to admit it so everyone can think less of us and by the way, it would help if you could back up your armored car to our bank so we can shovel scads and scads of cash into it.’.
So they protest their innocence. Before they get in front of a judge.
And the Zen master says “We’ll see.”.
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