‘Screaming at the top of our lungs’
Prisoners in jail van when man died say they tried to get guards’ attention, but were ignored
For more than an hour as they drove down Highway 97 in the back of a B.C. Corrections van on Oct. 4, inmates pounded on the walls and shouted for help.
They were worried fellow passenger Alex Joseph was dying of a drug overdose after watching him slump to the floor, at first snoring heavily, but later turning blue.
The jail guards driving the van from Prince George to Maple Ridge stopped for coffee in Williams Lake, but didn’t respond to their shouts, three of the inmates who were in the van told Postmedia this week.
When the van finally pulled over, north of 100 Mile House, Joseph, 36, was unresponsive. A passerby stopped and performed CPR, but he was dead.
His brother, Joseph Antoine, says he has a lot of questions about how his brother ended up dead while in the care of B.C. Corrections.
“For sure, it is upsetting,” he said. “It doesn’t make sense. I would like to know why and how this happened.”
Gordon Hansen, in custody on fraud charges, was in the same compartment as Joseph — each handcuffed and shackled — when the other inmate appeared to pass out after snorting something.
“We go around a corner and he can’t brace himself, so he slides off the seat onto me and then falls onto the floor,” Hansen said in a phone interview from Fraser Regional Correctional Centre.
“I took his leg up, slapping him, trying to get him up, but he’s snoring, so I know he is alive.”
Joseph later stopped snoring and his hand was blue. Hansen checked his breathing. He thought the officers in the cab would see Joseph on cameras they monitor.
But the van passed through Quesnel and continued on to Williams Lake without anyone checking on Joseph.
Hansen thinks the van was about 50 kilometres south of Williams Lake when it finally stopped.
“When they got me out, there was already an RCMP (officer) there, lights flashing,” he said.
Hansen said paramedics did not arrive for a long time — he thinks 40 minutes to an hour. Joseph was dead, but still in shackles and handcuffs.
Keghan Cosh was in the next compartment, but was able to see Joseph collapse to the floor.
“Just before Williams Lake, I could see that his hand was just blue. He was going under. He was done. He needed a naloxone shot and he would have been fine,” Cosh said in an interview from Fraser Regional.
“We were banging (on the van walls) at this time, maybe 10 or 20 minutes before Williams Lake. Maybe for half an hour, we were like screaming at the top of our lungs: ‘This guy is in overdose. Pull over, man.’”
Cosh thinks the officers just assumed they were misbehaving, “Which is understandable. I get it.”
But he thinks they should have noticed on their cameras that Joseph was in distress.
“For anyone to be treated the way that guy was treated is inhumane,” said Cosh, who has struggled with addiction himself and is serving a sentence for theft under $5,000.
In a statement, B.C. Corrections official Cindy Rose said “any in-custody death is a tragedy and our thoughts are with the family and friends of this individual.”
She also said her agency is conducting “a formal review of the circumstances to make recommendations that may reduce the likelihood of a similar incident in the future.”
“Staff in the cab of vehicles can monitor inmates via cameras mounted in the passenger compartment, supplemented by a two-way communications system,” the statement said.
The government did not respond to specific questions about what the inmates said happened before Joseph died.
The inmates also said they were being moved because of staffing shortages at the Prince George jail.
Rose said only that inmates are transported between provincial jails “on an as-needed basis.”
Andy Watson, of the B.C. Coroners Service, said an investigation is underway to determine “the official cause of death and any contributory factors.”
Joseph was a member of the Lhts’umsyoo, or bear clan, in the Tl’azt’en Nation, northwest of Prince George.
He battled addiction for years and was in and out of jail. At the time of his death, he was in pre-trial custody on a number of charges, including assault causing bodily harm and uttering threats.
His family said he told them he was determined to go to treatment once he was out.
Inmate Josh Suvee-Forsythe said this week that he is still rattled by what he witnessed on Oct. 4. He was beside Cosh in the B.C. Corrections van when he saw Joseph crumple to the ground.
“We knew something was wrong right there,” said Suvee-Forsythe, who is also in Fraser Regional serving a 665day sentence for robbery. “We were doing everything we could to get the guards to respond. We covered the cameras. They just slammed on the brakes to make us fall down.”
Suvee-Forsythe said Joseph’s death was preventable and he wants his family to know they really tried to save his life.
“At the top of our lungs we were just screaming,” he said. “Looking at his skin — his hands were purple. His face was purple. He wasn’t moving.”