Why Did Anthany Have to Die?
by Jody Paterson

Victoria Times Colonist
July 26, 2000

Beautiful Anthany, not yet 30 on the day his mom laid down beside him for the last time. The doctor told her she could turn off the life-support machine fast or slow, her preference, so she turned it off as slow as she could. Just in case.

She hadn’t held him like that since he was a baby, when she used to cuddle up next to him with his nighttime bottle to get him to sleep. This time it was a respirator in her hand, and Nancy Dawson held it up to that beloved face and watched him leave her.

It’s been almost a year since Anthany’s death, and still no answers. He hadn’t been drinking. He wasn’t on drugs; only minute traces of marijuana were found in his system. He’d called home at 4 p.m. that August day and told his mom he was coming over, so how was it that half an hour later he was naked and face-down in an ambulance, trussed up by police and as good as dead already?

Nancy Dawson didn’t set out to pin her son’s death on police and hospital staff, or to become the poster child for a First Nations population sick of being treated differently. She just wanted to know why Anthany died. But the answer to that question is serious stuff indeed, and no one wants the finger of blame pointing at them when it’s all over. Files have been confiscated. Tempers have flared. The inquest that Dawson had hoped would clarify who was at fault has so far occupied itself with who wasn’t, precious time taken up by lawyer after lawyer anxious to exonerate their particular client.

Now this, yet another lengthy delay while the coroner’s office waits for DNA results to check for a genetic condition Anthany may have had.

If it’s positive, maybe it will explain what made him start running in and out of traffic that day on Oak Bay Avenue, groaning and holding his head, tearing his clothes off. But it won’t explain why police and paramedics put him tied up and face-down on the stretcher, or why a passer-by sat on Anthany’s chest while they restrained him.

It won’t explain why the specialist at the hospital assumed Anthany was dying of a heroin overdose, or why he wasn’t sent for a CT scan until his toxicology report came back clean.

It won’t explain a whole lot of things that go wrong when you’re an aboriginal hoping for fair treatment in a world that thinks it knows all about your kind, none of it good. Anthany hadn’t had a problem with drugs and alcohol since 1996, but his mom can’t shake the feeling that he was written off as just another cranked-up Indian that day. “We didn’t know he’d been in police custody until after his death two days later. We didn’t know he’d been detained under the Mental Health Act until we read it in the newspaper,” says his aunt, Yvonne Gesinghaus.

“And then to come into this inquest and hear the slander and the stereotyping, story after story trying to discredit Anthany as a drug user even though the tests showed nothing — it hurts.”

Gesinghaus worked alongside the nurses the night they brought Anthany in, cleaning the gravel from his mouth and forehead where his head had struck the ground, tending to the scrapes and bruises that stretched from his toes to his scalp. She has waited a long time for the answers, and wonders now if they will ever come.

A stranger brought a spray of red gladioli to the inquest Tuesday, one mom to another. She has a daughter who’s mentally ill and worries the day will come when she’ll lose her the same way, face-down and crazy in the back of some ambulance.

She’d made up a little sign to go along with the flowers: “Truth, justice and compassion,” it said. The bailiff told her she’d have to take it down.

jpaterson@times-colonist.com