‘This is just wrong’
By Jason Unrau - Tuesday, June 22, 2010 - 7 Comments
Four Aboriginal men have died in Yukon RCMP custody in 10 years. A recent inquest just raised more questions.
VINCE FEDOROFF/WHITEHORSE STAR/CP
On Dec. 2, 2008, Raymond Silverfox lay dying in the RCMP’s Whitehorse drunk tank. Despite his vomiting more than 23 times, medical attention was not deemed a priority for the 43-year-old, who was kept in custody rather than moved to a hospital. Instead, as closed-circuit camera footage shown at a coroner’s inquest held in April revealed, he was, in the final 13 hours of his life, ridiculed by officers and guards and told to lie in his own filth. Paramedics were eventually called, but by then, he’d succumbed to acute pneumonia.
Silverfox is the fourth Aboriginal person to die in Yukon RCMP custody in 10 years. Robert Stone died in May at a Whitehorse detox centre after a night of being bounced between paramedics, hospital and police. And the equipment that recorded Silverfox’s last hours was installed after December 1999, when John Tibbet Jr. hanged himself in a Whitehorse RCMP cell. Still, by mid-2000, two more Aboriginal men had perished in Yukon police custody.
