Appeal denied in street death case

An Alberta judge has rejected an appeal by the family of a man who died shortly after an Edmonton police officer dropped him off near a city shelter in 2014.

Don and Lena Szybunka, the parents of Klayten Szybunka, sought a court ruling that would have forced police Chief Rod Knecht to order a disciplinary hearing for the officer who took their 37-yearold son into custody, issued him a public intoxication ticket and then left him near Hope Mission at 9908 106 Ave. on June 28, 2014. He was found dead in a nearby green space hours later.

The Szybunka family alleged Const. Karl Mayer did not follow proper police procedure in dealing with an intoxicated person when he arrested and then released their son, and that there was “discrepancy” between two reports that Mayer filed about the incident.

But Knecht found that the alleged breaches were “not of a serious nature” and decided not to commence with a disciplinary proceeding in the case.

The parents filed an application with the Court of Queen’s Bench, arguing a judge should find Knecht’s decision “unreasonable” and to order the chief to commence a disciplinary action.

In a decision filed earlier this month, Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Eldon Simpson upheld the police chief ’s decision.

According to facts outlined in Simpson’s decision, police received a call that day that an intoxicated person was bothering residents in the area of 184 Street and 75 Avenue. Mayer arrived around 12:15 p.m. and encountered Klayten Szybunka.

Mayer took Szybunka into custody, and asked if he needed to go to the hospital. Szybunka said no, but agreed to be taken to the shelter at Hope Mission. Mayer dropped him off at the shelter around 1:07 p.m., but saw Szybunka walk away down the street. Around 4:15 p.m., the man’s body was discovered in a nearby green space.

In his decision, Simpson included information from an opinion provided by a medical examiner that the man died because of chronic ethanol alcohol abuse, noting that chronic alcoholics can die suddenly and unexpectedly. The medical examiner found that the amount of alcohol in Szybunka’s system was not high enough to have been the cause of death.

Scheduling for a public fatality inquiry into Szybunka’s death is still pending, according to Alberta Justice’s website.