MATTER OF PRINCIPLE
A police officer who reconstructed collision and crime scenes described his anguish; now his widow is fighting for support
Abbotsford police officer Rob Vroom collapsed and died in 2018 at age 50. The cause of death was cardiac arrhythmia; his wife Dalila says was the condition was brought on by PTSD from investigating car crash and crime scenes. She’s fighting Worksafebc for survivor’s benefits, mainly to set a precedent for other police widows.
It was Rob Vroom’s job to investigate mangled car wrecks and gruesome crime scenes, to reconstruct how those deadly events happened, and to later relive those memories as an expert witness in court.
“Every time I go to a call, it is ugly,” Vroom wrote in a 2008 letter in which he documented his struggles.
“This is the stuff that’s in my head. I can’t erase it. It’s with me all day and night,” he would later tell his wife Dalila, she recalled.
During his 20 years as an Abbotsford police officer, Vroom kept a red binder full of the photographs he took: cars and trucks smashed into unrecognizable pieces, a deflated airbag hanging out a window or a body bag lying on the ground — all stark reminders of the humans trapped in the carnage. Page after page of casualties, with gunshot or blunt-force trauma wounds, some missing limbs, most with clothing soaked with blood. There were men, women and children.
The binder is the kind that has a thick zipper on three sides, as if Vroom had wanted to trap the memories inside. At the front of his stark collection are photos from August 2007, when a pickup plowed into a procession of wedding guests who were walking along a dark road, killing six people and injuring 20. It was an accident that shattered the bride’s and groom’s families, and the larger Abbotsford community.
Vroom, who had extensive training in analyzing traffic collisions and in forensic diagramming of homicides and other major crimes, was one of the first officers to respond.
“All victims were still on scene and in my years was the most horrific scene I have ever attended,” he wrote in that 2008 letter. “We investigated the scene for some time, having to go back several nights to set up dummies dressed in similar clothes, etc., to investigate this file.”
The raw details he includes about the accident site are too gruesome to print.
“We had been to a few ugly calls prior to this incident — one involving a woman who burnt to death in her car, and a high school student who got ejected from his speeding vehicle and killed while leaving school. I was beginning to have some sleep and anxiety issues from these when I attended this (wedding) multi-fatality.”
It was a year after this call that he wrote the letter in 2008 to an advocate hired by the Abbotsford Police Union to help him with a Worksafebc claim.
Vroom ended the letter saying, “I know that PTSD has a habit of coming around and biting you in the ass down the road.”
His words would prove prophetic.
‘THE WALKING DEAD’
Vroom became a police officer in 1989 with Ports Canada and joined Abbotsford PD six years later, where he worked until Worksafebc accepted his PTSD claim in 2014. But his mental health deteriorated, his wife Dalila said. He was later diagnosed with major depressive disorder, or MDD, and struggled with severe anxiety, an extreme physical reaction to leaving his house, and a dependency on prescription anxiety pills.
His six-foot-four frame, once 300 pounds, slipped to 200. Vroom had loved dirt-biking, camping and boating with his son, but his zest for life began to fade.
“He was happy and he smiled. He didn’t have the permanent frown that he ended up with,” Dalila recalled. “In the end, he was so flat. He had no emotion, nothing . ... He just isolated. Basically, he was the walking dead.”
On a hot day in July 2018, Vroom was working on a trailer under a shady tree at his Maple Ridge home when he collapsed and died. The autopsy listed his cause of death as cardiac arrhythmia, when your heart beats too fast or too slow, due to idiopathic cardiomyopathy, a disease of the heart muscle, for unknown reasons.
Vroom’s premature death, at age 50, devastated his wife Dalila, an elementary school teacher, and their son, who was then 20.
It also ignited an intense battle with Worksafebc because Dalila believes his PTSD played a major role in the death of her husband, who she said had no family history of heart disease. She has spent nearly two years gathering evidence to back up her case: His death, after getting PTSD on the job, she reasoned, should be handled the same as police officers who die after being physically injured at work, whose surviving spouses can then typically collect a monthly survivor’s benefit from the provincial agency.
A key part of her evidence comes from a report by her husband’s longtime family doctor, who argued the anxiety stemming from the PTSD “led to weight loss, dehydration, electrolyte imbalance and sudden death.”
She has embarked, though, on an uphill battle.
‘WE HAVE LIFTED EVERY ROCK’
Worksafebc has accepted an increasing number of PTSD claims since provincial legislation changed two years ago to presume that first responders’ mental disorders were caused by their jobs, as long as they had experienced traumatic events at work.
Overall, work-related mental health claims approved by Worksafebc rose from 1,350 in 2017 to 2,310 in 2019; PTSD -specific ones jumped from 266 in 2017 to 641 in 2019.
However, Worksafebc denied Dalila’s application for survivor’s benefits, quoting the coroner and two medical experts who found no proof the PTSD had any relationship with the cardiac arrhythmia that killed her husband.
“I feel confident that we have lifted every rock that we can lift to make sure that we did Mr. Vroom’s estate justice. We recognize that he suffered from a significant mental health history, absolutely,” said Tanya Houghton, Worksafebc’s director of special care services. “(But) the evidence did not support any relationship between the actual condition he died of, and his PTSD or MDD.”
Recent academic studies examining large numbers of people have shown a relationship between PTSD and physical conditions, such as cardiac disease; but the exact reason why they are linked is still unclear and it may be challenging to prove that PTSD was the cause of a specific person’s heart condition, said UBC psychiatry professor Steven Taylor.
“It’s plausible and, in general there is a link between PTSD and sudden cardiac death, but that’s at a general population level. Most people with PTSD do not develop cardiac arrhythmia, causing cardiac death, but there is a trend that if you have PTSD you are more likely to have those things,” said Taylor, a PTSD expert who has written 300 scientific publications and 20 books, and in March was appointed to the federal government’s expert panel on COVID-19 as an adviser on behavioural sciences.
“Having said that, it’s very difficult to argue for a specific case because there are all kinds of causes of arrhythmia and sudden cardiac death. So it is very difficult to link, say, PTSD to weight loss and electrolyte imbalance and then to death. To argue that on an individual case could be very difficult, even though there is data on a population level suggesting a connection.”
Taylor provided examples of two international studies that seem to partly support Dalila’s hypothesis about her husband’s death.
In March, The American Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease wrote that PTSD may lead to a vulnerability of cardiac arrhythmias and bad cardiac outcomes. “PTSD is also associated with a decrease in heart rate variability ... which increases the risk of sudden death from arrhythmia.”
Last year, the British Medical Journal concluded that “stress-related disorders, including post-traumatic stress disorder, are robustly associated with multiple types of cardiovascular disease” and that was “particularly strong in cases of early onset diseases, occurring before the age of 50.”
Vroom first started complaining about PTSD in 2008, 10 years before his death, when he was 40.
RELIVING CARNAGE IN COURT
Staff Sgt. Rick Stewart, a veteran Abbotsford police officer, remembers Vroom as “well-respected by everyone and a genuinely nice guy who’d give you the shirt off his back.”
While he stressed he is not a medical expert, Stewart said he wouldn’t be surprised if exposure to trauma was related to his colleague’s death: As a collision reconstruction expert, Vroom investigated accidents involving serious injuries or death, and he was forced to relive that “carnage” when he testified years later in court.
That is why the police union paid for an advocate to help Dalila with her long, complicated fight with Worksafebc, said Stewart, who is the union president.
“It just seemed reasonable to the union that the mental and physical toll that policing took on Rob over the years could have contributed to his early death, so it was something we felt that we had a moral obligation to pursue for Rob and his family,” he said.
“If the experts can determine that there is a correlation ( between PTSD and death), then a favourable outcome with Worksafe could impact other first responder families who find themselves in similar unfortunate circumstances.”
Vroom investigated such high-profile cases that he was frequently photographed by newspaper photographers at accident and crime scenes: in 2007, when a 17-year-old driver was killed after a truck veered into his lane; in April 2009, when two young men, aged 19 and 21, were murdered just kilometres apart in gang-related hits; in July 2010 when a gangster’s 22-year-old girlfriend was mowed down by bullets; in 2011, when a 65-year-old man died after his car went into the Vedder River and sank.
Vroom’s CV says he attended a dozen crime-scene training courses in Canada and the U.S., and that as of 2008 (the last year he updated the resumé) he had investigated 100 serious accidents, involving everything from pedestrians to helicopters. Dalila said her husband’s work was so specialized that he carried a pager and was on-call 24/7. She said the couple fought for years for Worksafebc to accept the PTSD claim. She alleges that Worksafebc psychologists were very difficult and that investigators routinely parked in front of their house to ensure her husband was actually sick.
“I believe that they put him through hell, which in turn put my family through hell,” she said.
After Vroom’s death, Worksafebc sent a letter saying his PTSD claim payments would end, unless his wife believed his death was work-related and then she could apply for survivor’s benefits.
“I thought I should apply. But I didn’t know it would strip away layers of my soul,” she said.
In order to approve survivor benefits, Worksafebc, which is directed by the provincial government to enforce occupational safety standards and assist injured workers, must conclude one of two things have taken place: the death happened during an event at work or it was the direct result of a physical workplace injury that had been approved for compensation from Worksafebc.
“When you are looking at things like death arising out of an accepted psychological injury,” said Worksafebc’s Houghton, “the evidence is not as clear.”
Houghton said Worksafe is increasingly reviewing academic papers on PTSD’S long-term effects, but not on PTSD’S potential contribution to death. The agency has received no other claims similar to Vroom’s, she added.
“This is not something we have seen. We did extensive investigation into this claim, to the point that I wouldn’t approve the disallow of this claim for a very long time to ensure that we had covered all of our bases with respect to research, specialists, cardiac pathologists,” she said.
Dalila has asked Worksafebc to reconsider the decision, a formal step available to applicants. Houghton would not say when the agency will give her an answer. She noted the widow also has the right to appeal the decision.
Houghton said her agency would look into Vroom’s concerns about his interaction with Worksafebc psychologists and employees, saying the intent is not to cause undue stress or trauma.
“We are looking at our assessment and support services, and what the process is, and reviewing it in light of his mental health claim. Not with anything to do with his fatality,” she said. “I think we are doing the best we can with the evidence we have, but we sincerely express our sympathy to Mrs. Vroom and her son. This isn’t a nice experience to go through for her, and we’re very sorry that she is having to go through it.”
Taylor, the UBC expert, said academic research suggests a potential link between PTSD and heart disease when, for example, people try to mask their condition with drinking or drug abuse or a sedentary lifestyle. “They could be downstream effects of PTSD, which leads to maladapted coping which, in turn, leads to cardiovascular disease.”
But, Taylor warned, it could be very difficult to make that causal link in a specific case.
“Life is simple when you are looking at things at a population level: Is disorder X correlated with disorder Y? That is easy to do. But to demonstrate that for a specific individual — there are so many things, so many factors that can lead to cardiac death.” ‘PRINCIPLE OF THE MATTER’
After her husband’s death, Dalila met with the then-abbotsford chief, Bob Rich, who promised her changes would be made at the department. Rich has since retired, and Abbotsford police did not respond to a request to discuss any modifications to better support the mental health of officers.
Stewart, the union president, confirmed changes were made in recent years, after a “disproportionate number” of illnesses and suicides, and the fatal shooting of Const. John Davidson. Among them, every officer now meets with a police psychologist for one hour each year for a mental well-being assessment, and those in “higher risk positions,” such as collision reconstructionists, have these checkins more frequently.
Dalila’s family and friends advised her not to pursue the survivor’s benefits application with Worksafebc, predicting it would be too hard on her. But she forged ahead, she said, because after fighting to get her husband’s PTSD acknowledged before his death, she decided to keep fighting out of “the principle of the matter.”
“It would feel like I fought for nothing all those years ... that Rob’s dead and who cares,” she said. “If Worksafe accepts me, then I’m setting a precedent for other police widows.”