Frank Paul inquiry raises questions of police cover-up

Was Frank Paul already dead when he was dumped by a Vancouver police officer in an alley almost nine years ago?

"It's a question that's out there but nobody's really saying it," First Nations activist Kat Norris told the Georgia Straight . "It begs for an answer."

In an interview on November 16 at a downtown federal court, the venue of the public inquiry into Paul's death, Norris suggested that an affirmative answer would give substance to persistent suspicions that there was a cover-up in the death of the 47-year-old Mi'kmaq man from New Brunswick.

For one, Norris pointed out that if police had reported that Paul had died while he was in police custody, the Coroners Service of B.C. would have had no recourse under the Coroners Act except to order an inquest. Such a mandatory court proceeding with a jury never took place in this case.

Former Vancouver mayor and now Senator Larry Campbell was the B.C. chief coroner at that time, Norris, organizer for the Indigenous Action Movement, recalled. "That's one of the things we want to come out," she said.

Campbell, a former RCMP officer before he joined the coroners service, didn't return a Straight call before deadline.

Norris noted that all that is known is that Paul died of hypothermia. But she also said that until the present inquiry had been called, there had been no opportunity to determine whether or not Paul was actually alive when he was left in the East Vancouver alley on the evening of December 5, 1998.

"That's one thing no one's really sure about," she said. "It's important to know why they want to cover it up so badly. That changes things. It's important for true justice to Frank and for anyone else who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody."

First Nations activists like Norris aren't the only ones who suspect that Paul died while in the hands of the Vancouver police.

After reviewing the Paul file, police complaint commissioner Dirk Ryneveld released an extensive report in 2004 in which he expressed hope that either the chief coroner or the attorney general would be persuaded to call for a coroner's inquest or a public inquiry.

In his report, Ryneveld noted that in choosing not to call for an inquest, the coroners service relied on information provided by the Vancouver police "in what I now deem to have been an incomplete and therefore flawed investigation".

Ryneveld stated that at that time, the coroner's office didn't have two vital pieces of information, one of which was a report made by pathologist Rex Ferris "that, among other things, indicates that Frank Paul may well have died in the police wagon itself".

The other information, according to the commissioner, was the police jail video that showed Paul being dragged in a "helpless state into the police transport" before he was left in the alley where he was later found.

But that doesn't mean that the coroner's office was without any authority to order an inquest. Ryneveld wrote that even if the service was correct in determining that Paul was technically no longer in police custody when he died, "in my respectful view, the coroner still had a residual discretion to hold a coroner's inquest pursuant to Section 18 of the Coroners Act".

Dana Urban, a former senior legal adviser to then–police complaint commissioner Don Morrison, had also relied heavily on Ferris's report and the jail video in his testimony on April 15, 2002, before a special legislative committee that reviewed the police complaint process.

Quoting Ferris's report, Urban told the committee that "it is likely that his [Paul's] fatal hypothermia developed over the course of many hours, and there seems no doubt that he was suffering from hypothermia when he was removed from the jail".

The bottom line? "He [Paul] died during or soon after his involvement with the Vancouver city police department," Urban said in his testimony.

Paul was among the numerous people helped a number of times by Barry Conroy, 55, when the latter was still with Saferide, a program run by the Vancouver Recovery Club that transports people suffering from the effects of alcohol and drugs to detoxification centres and shelters. He testified before the public inquiry on November 16.

"He was what I would call a gentleman," Conroy said of the Mi'kmaq man. Paul, according to Conroy, was "polite" and though he was usually drunk from rice wine, there was "dignity" in the way he struggled to raise himself from the pavement to get into the Saferide van.

It was also Conroy's first time to see the police jail video that showed an apparently unconscious Paul being dragged by his feet to his last ride on a police wagon. Conroy noted that the proper thing that should have been done at that time was to call for an ambulance to take Paul to a hospital.

Lawyer Cameron Ward is representing the United Native Nations Society in the public inquiry. In an interview with the Straight , Ward noted that the postmortem examination didn't indicate the time of Paul's death.

"It's a question of fact whether or not he was alive either when he was dragged out of the jail into the wagon or when he was taken out of the wagon and put where he was found deceased," Ward said. "It's one of the issues for the inquiry to establish."

As pieced together from the police video by the 2004 Ryneveld report, a "motionless" Paul was dragged into the jail elevator at 8:25 p.m. on December 5, 1998. His condition was seen by a number of individuals, including the sergeant on duty, who determined that Paul wasn't intoxicated. Five minutes later, at 8:30 p.m., a police wagon driver and a provincial jail guard dragged "a still rain-soaked, motionless Frank Paul from the elevator to the police wagon along the floor of the wagon bay area". The wagon driver delivered another intoxicated person in the wagon to a detoxification centre before placing Paul in a nearby alley. His lifeless body was found at 2:41 a.m. on December 6, 1998, at that same location.

Links:
Coroners Act, S. 18 "Warrant for inquest"
Indigenous Action Movement
United Native Nations Society