‘That was me on the pavement’
Video of fatal police encounter brings back terrifying memories for former Argo Bowen
It wasn’t long ago that Orlando Bowen, the former Argonauts linebacker, was listening to his 17-year-old son Dante gush about the exciting reality of getting his driver’s licence.
“He was saying, ‘I can drive myself to lacrosse practice, so you don’t have to worry about it. I can drive to see my friends,’ ” Bowen said.
But a fun conversation promptly took a grim detour.
“And then he pauses and says, ‘Can you make sure the ownership and registration is easily accessible, so if I ever get stopped I can take it out and put it on the dash so I can keep my hands where they can see them,’ ” Bowen said. “And I was like, ‘Yeah. We’ll make sure of that.’ ”
In raising three teenage sons to the difficult realities of being Black, these are the kinds of crucial details Bowen and his wife, Skye, have come to see it as essential to the dinner-table dialogue in their Brampton household. Always keep your hands where the police officer can see them if you’re ever stopped, lest there be any misunderstandings of your intention. Never wear your hoodie with the hood up, especially when you’re out and about in the United States, lest you be perceived as a threat.
“They’re important things. I never want my sons to come back to me after something painful happens and say, ‘Dad, why didn’t you tell me?’ ” Bowen said. “We would be doing everyone a disservice if we weren’t honest with them. Painfully honest, sometimes. But honest.”
If there’s ever been a moment for every family to engage in straightforward dialogue about racial injustice and what society ought to do to correct it, the fallout from George Floyd’s senseless May 25 murder is providing it. And if there’s a person who can speak to the issues with the wisdom of experience and the gift of eloquence, Bowen is more than up to the task. It was back in 2004 that Bowen found himself in a predicament scarily reminiscent of the heinous crime that claimed Floyd —one that should remind us all that the abuse of police power doesn’t stop at the Canada-U.S. border.
Waiting for friends in his car in the parking lot of a Mississauga night club, on the way to toasting the new contract he had just signed with the Hamilton Tiger-Cats, the story goes that Bowen was approached by two men who asked him if he had drugs.
When he brushed them off, they persisted. The men, it turned out, were plainclothes officers from Peel Regional Police Service. An altercation ensued. And in one frightening instant, a night that was supposed to be a celebration of Bowen’s professional success turned into a fight for his survival. The way he remembers it, he eventually found his bloodied face pressed into the asphalt, a knee driving into his back, a forearm pinning his neck.
“I was convinced I was going to be killed,” Bowen said. “I just kept thinking in my mind, ‘Oh my God. This is how my life is going to end.’ ”
Bowen, now age 44, said watching the video of Floyd dying at age 46 was “gutwrenching.” It was also flashback-inducing.
“That was me,” Bowen said. “That was me on the ground. That was me on the pavement.”
There was no video evidence of Bowen’s run-in with police, which might speak to why, for a long time, Bowen was the one on trial for assault and drug possession (Bowen says police planted cocaine on him during their altercation). After months of personal turmoil and legal entanglement, Bowen was eventually exonerated of all charges after one of the officers was charged and later convicted of a drug-trafficking offence that led to his resignation from the force and a judge ruled the testimony of the officers was “unworthy of belief.”
Bowen sued Peel police for $14 million, a matter that was settled out of court. Still, the officers were never charged in relation to the interaction; a Peel police spokesperson told CTV in 2018 that two internal reviews found “no misconduct in relation to Mr. Bowen's incident.” But Bowen’s brush with the corrupt came with consequence. The concussion he suffered, which he says still occasionally gives him trouble with his balance, led to his retirement from the CFL. And there was a time he feared it might cost him his secondborn son, Justice.
“Skye was pregnant with him during the assault. So our prayer was that justice would prevail,” Bowen said. “I didn’t know if she was going to make it to term because of all the stress we were under.”
Justice plays in a marching band that performed in Normandy on the 75th anniversary of D-Day a year ago Saturday. He’s 15 now, which means he’s not far away from joining Dante — who is heading to Ohio State University next year on a lacrosse scholarship — among the ranks of licensed drivers, which may or may not make a couple of parents extra nervous. At least there’ll be another potential option to transport 13-year-old Marcus to football practice; he’s the Bowen who’s taken up his father’s love for the gridiron.
The thought has occurred to Orlando Bowen that if things had gone only slightly differently, Dante might now be a fatherless only child to a widowed mother. But it says something about the former CFLer’s outlook that, as soul-destroying as his assault could have been, he can now enumerate its gifts.
“My assault, and the thought that I was about to die, really put into perspective the things that were important in life,” he said. “It allowed me to hug my kids tighter at night. When I’m spending time with people who are hurt or broken, it’s allowed me to deeply empathize with them. So those are gifts that came from a very traumatic experience, but they are gifts nonetheless.”
In that vein, Bowen, who describes himself as a “glassthree-quarters-full kind of guy,” says the overwhelming attention being paid to Floyd’s death and its fallout can only be seen as a tragedy that’s morphed into an opportunity. With the pandemic leaving so many people stuck at home, and with so little else to distract from the race-relations narrative, Bowen figures it’s an unprecedented moment of introspection for North American society.
“I know I’ve never been in a position where everybody is thinking about, even if it’s just for a moment, the lived experience of Black people, especially the experience of what it’s like to be a Black male — to be a suspect all the time,” Bowen said.
Bowen isn’t somebody who simply opines in the media. He’s an in-demand corporate speaker who brings his voice to companies seeking his unique perspective. He also heads the youth-leadership charity One Voice, One Team, which is currently in the midst of a sponsorship drive to send young people to an online summer camp designed to help them acquire the life skills to navigate these uniquely challenging times.
“The reality is that kids are hurting right now, and they need us,” Bowen said. “A lot of parents are like, ‘I don’t even know how to talk to my kids about this stuff right now.’ But kids are talking about it. And there’s some kids we’ve talked to who’ve said they feel like giving up hope. We have to do something that allows them to find hope.”
Bowen’s story is itself a source of inspiration. A few years back, a decade after he was beaten up and framed by police, he wrote a letter of forgiveness to the two men who wronged him. And as much as he’s been praised for the gesture, he said he wrote it not to absolve his transgressors but to help himself move past the trauma.
“Forgiveness is not for them, it’s for us,” he said. “It’s for us to know that we don’t have to hold onto things that have pained us. We can let go.”
Unencumbered by the defining nightmare of his past, there’s optimism in Bowen’s voice as he ponders a future where driving while Black won’t be reason for a 17-yearold’s trepidation, a future in which racism has been relegated to an anachronism. Watching the video of George Floyd’s death, he said, didn’t only bring him back to that parking lot in Mississauga in 2004. It got him thinking about the roots of such brutality, how they sprout, and how they might one day be pruned from our midst.
“We’re not born to do that. We’re not wired to treat each other that way,” Bowen said. “So my question always goes to, ‘What could have possibly led to that type of a scenario?’ And how do we go upstream to make sure those things can’t happen? How do we make sure it’s such an anomaly that it doesn’t even register on the radar?
“I’m so hopeful. I’ve never been more hopeful. I’ve never seen anything like this, a moment like this, in my life. This is history in the making. How we choose to respond to this moment will make history.”