Hundreds of Canadians attend funeral for Tasered Pole
VANCOUVER (AFP) — Some 650 people attended the funeral Saturday of a Polish emigre who died at Vancouver airport after police stunned him with a Taser, a disturbing incident that was videotaped by a bystander and shown around the world.
"We were quite surprised. People came from everywhere," said Kamloops Funeral Home owner Lawrence Schrader. Zofia Cisowski, the mother of the 40-year-old victim, Robert Dziekanski, had planned for 100 mourners, he said.
"We also got emails from as far away as Hawaii from people expressing condolences," Schrader added.
Another 1,000 Canadians attended vigils around the country for Dziekanski, including one at Vancouver airport, where he died on October 14.
The Polish emigrant's death at the hands of four members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), and especially its video first broadcast on Thursday, has shocked Canadians and prompted Poland to ask Ottawa for an explanation.
The RCMP has launched an investigation, and in his first public comments since the incident RCMP Commissionner William Elliott said Saturday the four officers involved in Dziekanski's had been assigned to other duties.
The video shows Dziekanski appearing distraught and frightened after waiting hours for his mother at the airport. At one point he takes a computer off a desk and throws it to the ground, as security guards look on remarking that he did not speak English.
Then four RCMP officers walk toward Dziekanski, surround him and, as he turns away raising his hands, close in on him stunning him repeatedly with a Taser device before piling on top of him pinning him to the floor. Within minutes he falls still.
His family's lawyer said Dziekanski spoke only Polish, and had never before wandered far from his hometown Pieszyce, Poland where he was a construction worker. He came here to live with his mother.
Due to a mix-up at the airport, he had waited for his mother for almost 10 hours in a secure customs area, while she waited for him in the arrivals area on the other side of a wall.
After unsuccessfully asking airport and immigration staff for help finding out if her son had arrived, she left, and nobody at the airport seemed to have noticed Dziekanski waiting for hours in the secure area.
The RCMP commissioner admitted the video images were "disturbing," but considered it inappropriate to draw any conclusions during an ongoing investigation.
"This serious event deserves a comprehensive and complete examination and we are confident that the processes under way will provide the proper basis on which to make conclusions and to determine appropriate action," Elliott said.
Schrader said people responded to the way Dziekanski died.
"I was touched because here's his mother, who worked for seven years at two jobs to help pay to get him over here, then he comes over here, and that's the reception he gets. It's horrible. It's the opposite of what our country is supposed to be," he said.
Schrader said Dziekanski's body has been cremated, and his mother plans to return with his ashes to Poland for burial.
