Saturday November 18,2000

Jody Paterson

Victoria Times Colonist

There’s a thing that happens when something is going wrong somewhere, a

little clutch of fear triggered by sirens or distant puffs of smoke that can start you worrying that it’s one of yours in trouble.

Rebecca Steele saw the people milling around at the intersection of Oak Bay

and Richmond avenues that August day and worried that her little boy might

have been hit by a car. Tasha Libertore feared her dog had been hit. A woman

inching past the young man at the centre of the ruckus thought for a moment it was her daughter’s boyfriend, while another heard groans and wondered if it was the plastic-surgery patient she’d been tending to.

In the end it was none of those, just a man who nobody knew in the grips of

something awful. Anthany Dawson thrashed and flailed on the street, shirt gone, all the muscles in his 29-year-old body showing rigid through his

skin.

"Every single breath out was a scream from start to finish," recalled

Libertore, testifying Friday at the coroner’s inquest into Dawson’s death 15 months ago. "I remember asking a guy on the sidewalk what was going on, and

he said he thought [Dawson] was having a schizophrenic episode."

Not long before, Dawson had been with friends near the McDonald’s restaurant

on Pandora Avenue. The next time anyone saw him, he was shirtless and running down the middle of Pandora like the devil was after him, running and

falling writhing onto his back and running some more, block after block all the way to the intersection of Oak Bay Avenue and Bank Street.

By then he had the police after him and was naked, having torn off his pants

and shoes in a frenzy before sprinting away from the ambulance crew that had

just pulled up. Witnesses saw him squat onto his haunches, run some more, fall onto his knees and elbows, all the time lost in some secret terror.

It’s a mystery, this thing that possessed Anthany Dawson on the afternoon of Aug. 11, 1999. There were no drugs in his system except a little marijuana, no history, nothing but a first cousin once removed who has a rare genetic condition, CPT1, that Dawson may share.

Whether the condition would have killed him on its own that day is unclear,

as too many other bad things were happening all at the same time. He’d run a long distance on a hot day and was in full "fight-or-flight" state, his heart racing and his body temperature soaring. And when police finally caught up to him, he’d struggled hard as they pinned him to the ground and handcuffed behind his back, then tied him face down on a stretcher.

Dawson’s heart stopped minutes later in the ambulance en route to Royal Jubilee Hospital. He wouldn’t be pronounced dead for another two days, but he never regained consciousness.

No death so odd is easy to accept, and the on-again off-again inquest into

Dawson’s death has been marked by the family’s charges of racism and rough

handling. Dawson was aboriginal, and the question lingers: Did that make a

difference to how it all turned out?It has certainly made a difference to how many lawyers are involved in the

inquest — seven of them, each representing someone with a reputation to defend.

There’s the coroner’s lawyer, another for the Dawson family, one for the City

of Victoria, a lawyer each for the Victoria Police Department, B.C.

Ambulance Service, and local doctors. Then there’s the lawyer representing a Victoria police officer and a sheriff’s deputy who was off-duty when he helped in Dawson’s arrest, the guy who witness Molly McCance saw sitting on "Mr. Dawson’s bum" when Dawson was

being tied onto the stretcher. It wasn’t an easy task, but McCance felt

police did it as nicely as possible.

Nice or not, it must have been a miserable way to die. Wish for better for your own children, should torment ever seize them on a warm August day.

jpaterson@times-colonist.com

Friday November 17, 2000

Jody Paterson

Victoria Times Colonist

At least they were kind, the strangers who tried to help that day. They kept the passing cars from running over him, called for an ambulance, retrieved his wallet and sunglasses each time he threw them away.But Anthany Dawson was a man in the grips of something terrifying,and it seemed like he barely knew they were there. He'd writhe on his back, then leap to his feet and run down the street, then somehow be back writhing on the ground so fast that those who were there can't even remember how he got from standing up to lying down again.He'd been running down the middle of the road for maybe three-quarters of a kilometre before cyclist Chelsea Garside spotted him, by then lying on his back dangerously close to traffic near the intersection of Oak Bay and Richmond avenues. It was almost like he was trying to grind his skin into the ground, his arms and legs thrashing and his body rolling from side to side.``My first thought was that he'd had a seizure, or maybe that he was from [psychiatric hospital] Eric Martin,'' Garside recalled Thursday at the inquest into Dawson's death 15 months ago.She told him everything was going to be OK. ``No, no, I'm not going to be OK,'' he yelled. ``It's all wrong, all wrong.'' But it wasn't like he was answering her, more like he was just speaking the words out loud to whoever might be listening.Cam Dafoe had that same feeling at first after he came upon the small crowd gathering around Dawson. An Albertan visiting relatives in Victoria at the time, Dafoe recalled in written testimony how he'd futilely tried to quiz the panicked Dawson about his condition.``I was asking him: Can you tell me what's wrong? Are you on medication? Have you taken drugs? Are you epileptic? He wouldn't answer, and I thought he couldn't understand,'' wrote Dafoe. ``But when I said I was going to look in his wallet, he put his hand across his pocket where his wallet was to stop me. And when I asked him, `Are you tripping?' he suddenly jumped up and said, `I'm not ... ODing.' ''It's an important point, that one, because the question has come up over and over at this difficult inquest: Was Dawson in the grips of a drug frenzy? Could that explain why the young First Nations carver -- who'd officially given up his bad old days some time ago -- was a man possessed that August day, why his heart stopped in the ambulance not long after police and paramedics put him face down onto a stretcher?The tests found only a little marijuana in his system, but the experts have their theories -- ``marijuana psychosis,'' maybe, or some kind of mystery cocaine flashback. Dawson's family have their own theories, of how the first thing that goes through a white man's head when an Indian is acting crazy is that the guy must be either drunk or stoned.Look at how it's gone for Percy Lagis, Dawson's cousin. In the five years before a specialist finally diagnosed his rare genetic condition, Lagis went to the hospital emergency ward 85 times for help with the severe muscle spasms that characterize the condition. And almost every time, they figured he'd either been drinking or was high on cocaine.Lagis has both of the bad genes that cause CPT1, a disease in which the body tries to consume its own muscles for energy. Dawson had one, which might have predisposed him to seizures but still doesn't explain the events of that day.Testing for the condition has dragged out the inquest, delayed twice since its start in July and now set to finish at the end of this month. The family is glad to see the genetics thing resolved, but weary of the wait for the rest of the story, and how it is that a healthy young man can be on his way home for dinner one moment and dying the next.

Dafoe was stunned to learn months later when his wife's parents visited them in Edmonton that the man he'd tried to help hadn't survived.