This was an amazing book! I watched the video first and automatically saw what the world saw and what the media portrayed. But upon reading this book my views have changed drastically. This book is about corruption in the Canadian legal system and those aligned with it; being the rcmp. This is about the lives affected in the decade long media frenzy around four rcmp members who chose to use the taser in a difficult situation that ended in the death of Robert Dziekanski.

A must read type of book. It will have steam coming out of your ears. There must be a better way of detaining someone than the decision that was taken. Read this well written book and decide for yourself if their actions were justified. Happy reading!

Well done account of a specific incident involving the RCMP but it's really about more. What happened to Robert Dziekanski and then the aftermath could have happened anywhere and to any law enforcement agency. That is by no means a criticism of law enforcement but rather an acknowledgement that stress, training, and crisis do not always mix with the new ability of bystanders to video events. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC of this cautionary tale.

This is a well-researched book that takes a look into a situation a while back in Canada where, after a series of mishaps a man got lost in an airport while trying to immigrate into Canada, it went on an excessively long time and no one understood his language and he had a meltdown. The Mounties were called to the scene when the man lost control, and during the confrontation, sadly, he suddenly died in police custody. A witness happened to catch one angle of the incident on video. It happened at the glass-walled Immigration section at an airport after he’d gotten lost and agitated. He only spoke Polish and no one could understand him. A Taser was involved. All four RCMP’s involved, three of whom were still fairly new in their careers, felt they’d done their job to the best of their ability and training that night, and that the witnesses and video would verify the necessity of their actions that night.

But once the man’s mother found out the next day that her only son was deceased, and had made the trip, after all, she was out of her mind with grief, screaming. She’d depleted her small savings so that they could spend what time she had left together, getting him set up in a new life in Canada. Hopefully a happy one. Her husband was very ill in a nursing home and she’d been so looking forward to her son coming, he was all she had and now she had nothing! And a funeral to find the money to pay for too. It was too much. When the video went out without context, things went very badly against the officers. From the angle of the video, you couldn’t see what the officers saw. This will affect lives for years and there will be more lives lost over it before it’s done, which is the saddest part.

It didn’t help that a couple of workers at the airport didn’t try to locate him when his mother showed up after a 4 hour trip to pick him up, they just brushed her off and told her he wasn’t there, that his flight had landed hours ago and he must not have made the trip, instead of actually making an effort to find out, and worse, they told her to just go home and call Poland. She was not allowed beyond the security checkpoint to search for him herself of course. I believe from what they figured out later, mother and son only missed each other by a few minutes in reality. It was that close.

This book is pretty intense, heartbreaking, and well written. I feel like these cops got a crappy deal. I’m sure there will be differing opinions upon reading the book and I look forward to seeing what they are. I don’t want to spoil anything, so I’ll leave it there. A very good read. My second book dealing with Mounties too recently, I like that. My thanks for the advance electronic copy that was provided by NetGalley, author Curt Petrovich, and the publisher for my fair review.

BLAMED AND BROKEN REVIEW

Forget about Nelson Eddy as Sergeant Bruce of the Mounties in the 1936 movie, “Rose-Marie.” Attractive as he was in his red serge jacket, and as exhilarating as his voice was in his rendition of “The Mounties,” (here come the Mounties to get the man they’re after … and we’ll get you soon) something’s hollow. After reading Curt Petrovich’s “Blamed and Broken,” those words echo and I am no longer a great fan of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. I even found that the movie was filmed in Lake Tahoe, not the Canadian Rockies. Another sham.

Petrovich takes a long and tortuous route describing the misfortunes of four young Mounties who were dispatched in 2007 to check the circumstances at Vancouver International Airport where it was reported that a man was raving wildly while tossing furniture, trying to break windows, and terrifying nearby observers. In just 26 seconds the man was approached, surrounded, tasered, on the ground and handcuffed, and went into his death throes. It took 10 years and millions of dollars to get the case adjudicated (it might not be over yet) and resulted in the deaths of three men, and condemned four others to be disgraced and to live in shame and suspicion.

According to the author, and explained quite well, things are not always as they seem. Tragedies such as the airport incident most often only occupy our minds for a few minutes. But a combination of events including confusion during stressful confrontation, an overzealous photographer, a distraught mother with limited communications ability, troopers who didn’t understand their confusion was normal, higher-up officials scrambling to protect integrity, an overeager press, public outcry, interference from well-meaning but uninvolved individuals, and courts divided in opinion were all instrumental in the search for a decision as to how the guilt was to be disbursed.

RCMP training was lacking in many aspects and the death of Robert Dziekanski might have occurred because the officers had bad information about Taser usage and safety. Disagreement by mental health experts added extra stress to the involved Mounties’ mental condition. One top RCMP brass hat issued harsh criticism of his officers before all the facts were uncovered and refused to change his stance when new information was disclosed. Refusal by top government officials to promptly pay legal expenses added great pressure to the men and their families. A spokesman for the RCMP committed suicide during the procedures, unable to cope with the tension. And, in the end, two got sent to prison and two were exonerated, adding even more distaste to the entire affair.

So, as you can see, the author had a lot to explain in his accounting. He did a great job covering the disparate facts, although he might have found that fewer words could have shortened his efforts. I recommend this book although the RCMP has been dropped from my hero list. Eh?

Schuyler T Wallace
Author of TIN LIZARD TALES

As the subtitle "The Mounties and the Death of Robert Dziekanski" might suggest, this was a curiously-biased report of a fatal Taser™ incident which took place in October 2007 at the Vancouver International Airport in Canada, where four Royal Canadian Mounted Police confronted a Polish immigrant named Robert Dziekański, who spoke no English, and who was obviously frustrated and angry, but who had not hurt anyone and was threatening no one.

According to Goodreads (and this may be in error since Goodreads librarians are listed under 'useless' in the dictionary) the book is also titled Twenty-Six Seconds: A Fateful Decision. A Dead Man. A Decade of Cover-Up, so that ought to tell you something about how sensationalist the book is. Talking of Goodreads librarians, the book is listed as" Blamaed and Broken" so Goodreads' crappy search engine will never find this. You have to search by author name to get to it. This is one good reason why I quit posting reviews to Goodreads. It's about what I expect from something that has been stained by Amazon.

Let me say up front that it's far easier to make judgments on the sidelines and after the fact than it is when you're directly involved and in the middle of something as it happens, but from all I've read and seen, including the poorly-shot and misinformed video available on You Tube, Dziekański was far more defensively postured than ever he was aggressively so. He didn't offer anything like aggression until he was tasered, and even then he was not trying to harm anyone. He was clearly reacting in pain. The trigger for the tasering was after he turned around on the mounties with a stapler in his hand, and it all went sideways.

At this point he was repeatedly tasered, and when handcuffed and on the ground Dziekanski became increasingly physiologically distressed. He was denied airport medical treatment and got none until external medical services arrived. The RCMP officers initially refused to remove handcuffs when requested to do so by the EMTs, and when the cuffs were removed and the EMTs began working on the guy, he was found to be already dead. The video is misleading because there is a male voice on it repeatedly offering misinformation - such as declaring that the guy speaks Russian when he was speaking Polish. Clearly the commentator did not know this, but that's my point: don't declare something to be so out of ignorance. The voice asks, "How is he still fighting them off" when the guy is clearly lying subdued on the floor, and barely moving.

After Dziekański's death, the entire RCMP organization retreated behind a wall of 'we followed procedures' and 'we were just doing our job,' but it seemed obvious that they mishandled this situation and over-reacted, and presented a very poor face to the public afterwards, despite a phenomenal outcry that demanded contrition and an explanation.

No one in their right mind can deny that any law-enforcement officer has a difficult job to do and it's rarely in ideal conditions, but in these circumstances where the guy was not armed (unless you class a small stapler as a weapon, which they did), and was not attacking anyone, and with whom they could not communicate effectively, and given there were four trained RCMP officers present who had the guy confined if not restrained, the mismanagement was appalling in my opinion. They had time, for example, to call in an EMT to be on standby if they had already considered use of a taser - which they had, yet they delayed calling EMT help despite obvious signs of distress from the subdued Dziekański and initially denied them clear access to the guy even after they showed up.

Despite all of this, the author is writing from the outset as though he has already decided to come down on the side of the police regardless of the facts, and everything he's doing is biasing the story that way. Instead of reporting dispassionately, he uses loaded language repeatedly, for example, at one point he wrote of the pressure on the four officers in the aftermath, "Each moment is a separate car in a freight train bearing down on them." Seriously? I about barfed when I read that line. Yes, they were under stress and doubtlessly felt bad about what happened, but let's not get carried away. Not one of them felt as bad as Dziekanski's mother did, who was initially told that her son was nowhere to be found in the airport, and then was called back later to be told he was dead?

The endless and rather repetitive details quickly became tedious, removing any sort of satisfaction in the reading, but I also found some interesting omissions. It's an oddity for example, that the incident with Robert Dziekanski which took place in October, 2007 was kept in complete isolation by the author. In November that year there were two more deaths in Canada from Taser incidents with police, and there was yet another one in December. Halfway through the book, when he was well into the inquest on these events several months after the fact, the author hadn't mentioned even one of these other incidents. Out of curiosity, I searched the entire book for the three names of the people involved, and not one of them is mentioned. I wonder why? For the record they are: Howard Hyde, who was hit with a Taser up to five times about 30 hours before he died, Robert Knipstrom, and the exotically-named Quilem Registre; all tasered by law-enforcement, all dead.

One of the officers in the Dziekański case was later involved in a drunk-driving incident in which he deliberately tried to hide the fact of his drinking. He turned left in front of an oncoming motorcycle which he apparently did not see. The author describes the collision as occurring at "as much as ninety-six kilometres (sixty miles) an hour," but it may also have been as low as 66 KPH (40 miles per hour) which is still a deadly speed, especially on a motorcycle. Robinson was neither charged with drunk driving, nor with causing a fatal accident, and got away with barely more than a slap on the wrist. The news reports of this incident say that the officer took his two children away from the scene to his mother's house nearby, before returning to the scene having apparently had one or two shots of vodka, but this book seems to suggest he left the twelve-year-old girl and the nine-year-old boy home alone after they had been traumatized by being in the vehicle at the time of the accident. I don't know which version is more accurate.

At one point the author writes, "Dziekanski's actual habits when it came to alcohol and cigarettes are relevant." but earlier he had reported on the autopsy: "no drugs or alcohol were found in Dziekanski's blood." Case closed! Oh, you can argue that if he was addicted to tobacco and/or alcohol and could not get any, then he might experience some sort of withdrawal, and react badly to that, but these things could be established from his autopsy (did his body show signs of alcohol or tobacco abuse?) and from his behavior at the time which was documented on a video shot by a bystander. I saw nothing written about that. The impression I got was that this author was simply knee-jerk reacting to news reports and going off on one tangent after another like a ball ricocheting off bumpers in a pinball game. By some fifty percent of the way through, he is so all-over-the-place that I completely lost interest in the book and couldn't stand to read any more.

I can't commend this as a worthy read. In my opinion it needs some real editing and trimming. It also needs better organizing, the book is back and forth so much. At one point I read, "Underneath his deliberately cool exterior he is one part angry, one part nervous, and ninety-nine parts certain his time in the witness chair is not going to end well." That adds up to 101 parts. That's one part too many to make rational sense, and is emblematic of this book.

Thank you NetGalley and Dundurn Press for an advance copy of this book which presents a disturbing and provocative account of over more than 10 years through a tangled web of our legal system: inquiries by police officials, trials, appeals, Supreme Court, psychiatric reports, etc. This unbiased and thorough reporting makes one wonder whether justice was served

Most Canadians were aware and upset by the death of an extremely agitated and confused man after being confronted by four rookie RCMP officers at the Vancouver airport in 2007. Robert Dziekanski, a Polish man who spoke no English, died after being lasered by one of the policeman during a struggle. A bystander captured the 26 second encounter on his cell phone camera, a film which would be considered primitive by todays’ standards. Before his death a series of mistakes and inaction by airport officials and Border Services employees led to the botched attempt of the RCMP officers’ attempt to subdue the frantic, distressed man.

His mother had comes long distance to meet and greet her son who had all the correct documents for the visit. She spent hours going from desk to desk trying to find him. She was told he wasn’t in the airport and perhaps never got on the flight to Canada. No attempt was made to search for him and she was told to go home.

Blame soon fell on the Mounties involved and they were accused of collusion and collaborating on their participation in the tragic event immediately after the death. The accusation of perjury was to haunt them through all the inquiries and trials afterwards. The Mounties were made out in the press as liars and engaged in a coverup of their actions and I was unaware that there was much more to the story. There was certainly a coverup, but seemingly an the part of RCMP officials, their lawyers, government, and psychiatrists they hired. We see how readily they were to accept a witness who claimed the four Mounties had met together at her home before their inquiries. Any of her statements were easily disproven, showing all were elsewhere at the time. Her ex-husband who claimed this never happened felt that attempts to threaten and intimidate him were made when he refused to confirm her stories. Nevertheless she was used as a witness against them for lies saying they never met to discuss testimony.

The RCMP officers lost or were demoted, their careers and reputation in shatters; two went to prison, and most suffered documented cases of PTSD for years afterwards. Years of bungled and biased prosecutions led to broken marriages and health issues. The man chosen to be the first spokesperson for the RCMP officials made public statements being unaware of the video and known facts. This led to his eventual suicide. His grieving widow was prevented by the RCMP to honour him in the funeral service she wanted.

My only problem with the book was the numerous names involved, especially at the beginning. When it came to more personal involvement in the trials and lives of the accused the narrative was easier to follow. I would have liked to have seen a list included of the various lawyers, police officials, judges, government officials along with their parts in the inquiries, trials and appeals. Because of the scope of this book which covered almost 11 years this would be most helpful. Very well researched investigative reporting.