Police: We had no choice but to taser senior

Police say a knife-wielding 82-year-old Royal Inland Hospital patient was tasered over the weekend after he refused to put down his weapon.

“He did have a knife in his hand,” Kamloops RCMP Cpl. Scott Wilson said.

“He wouldn’t put the knife down.”

Wilson said Mounties received a call from hospital security early Saturday morning.

“The call came in at 5:45 in the morning,” he said. “The call was that there was an irrational elderly male with a knife.”

According to Wilson, officers were briefed by the security guard on duty before confronting the patient, whose name has been withheld.

“They discovered that he had a knife in his possession,” he said. “It had about a three-inch blade and he would not surrender the weapon.”

It’s not known whether the man was seen by officers as a threat to himself or to others.

Wilson said the man made comments that concerned the officers.

“He made comments to us that the guy in the next bed might be dead,” Wilson said, adding that, because the man had a knife, officers thought they could potentially be dealing with a murder.

“At the time, the way he [was talking], we didn’t know,” Wilson said.

The other patient was later found to be asleep and it’s not known why the man said he might be dead.

Wilson said the tasered man was being treated for “emotional issues,’ noting he suffered no adverse reactions to the taser.

“There’s no indication that it caused any problems for him after the deployment [of the taser],” he said.

Marg Brown, health service administrator at RIH, said the man is in the same shape physically that he was before the incident.

“He’s being treated for the condition that brought him in,” she said, offering no further details of what the condition might be, other than to say the patient was housed in one of the hospital’s in-patient units and had “just been admitted recently.”

Given the circumstances of the call, Wilson said the officers had no other choice but to jolt the man with a taser.

“Officers were very cognizant of this man’s age,” he said.

“But they really had no other choice but to use the taser.”

Wilson said officers resorted to taser use as a last resort, even attempting to knock the knife out of the man’s hand with a food cart.

“The officers tried some tactics [before deploying a taser],” Wilson said. “There were a lot of verbal commands, and they thought about pepper spray, but you don’t want to contaminate the hospital.”

Given the timing of the incident, just two days before the beginning of a public inquiry into last fall’s tasering death of Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver International Airport, Wilson said he expects to hear reaction from the public.

“The sheer nature of what [police officers] do is always subject for people to scrutinize and criticize,” he said.

“But if you look at this occasion, clearly we didn’t want to use lethal force and we couldn’t use pepper spray.

“Somebody hearing this story, if they say, ‘Well, that’s just the cops tasering another innocent person,’ that’s not the case. Looking at the safety of this gentleman, and looking at all the circumstances, I think the call they made was the right one.”

Brown said patients’ personal belongings are not usually searched upon their admission to the hospital, so it would have been easy for the man to bring in the weapon, which she referred to as a “pocket knife.”

“We don’t routinely go through our patients’ belongings unless there is some reason to suspect that they might have something,” Brown said, adding that exceptions are made for patients being admitted for psychiatric care.

“When he was admitted, we had none of those concerns.”

Brown said incidents in which hospital staff are forced to call the RCMP for assistance are rare.

“It’s important for the community to know that this is a very rare occurance,” she said. “It’s rare that we have patients become agitated to this point.”

Brown said the man was moved to a private room after the incident.

“Generally, in a situation like that, we try to put them in a private room for their own good,” she said. “You’re upset and agitated when you get to that point.”

Wilson said the man will not face criminal charges.