Constable Sweet is one of forty-one officers listed, as of July 2017, on the Line of Duty Death Honour Roll for the Toronto Police Service.
Dave heard all of the graphic details about Constable Sweet’s shooting, hostage taking, and death from the officer’s peers, colleagues, friends, and superiors who either attended at, or were involved with, the hostage taking.
The event put Dave “into a tailspin.” He knew he needed out and was willing to take a lower-paying job to get out. “I have ten reasons why I left the police service and none of them were connected to that Line of Duty Death,” he said, of his initial denial the traumatic case had anything to do with his eventual quitting of the police job. “I needed out of there because of critical incident stress, what I now know is posttraumatic stress.”
Nine months after the officer died, Dave left the police service and joined the ambulance service, the precursor of the Toronto Paramedic Service.
“As far as I was concerned, leaving the police department had nothing to do with the Line of Duty Death. Retrospectively, because I wasn’t [physically] on the call, I couldn’t have affected the call … The officer was taken hostage by people who were robbing a restaurant. There was a stand-off of many hours. There were two suspects. That’s what I relived – the absolute details. He [the officer] died in hospital from injuries inflicted.”
It was 2009 before Dave finally made the connection. “It wasn’t until twenty-nine years later that I realized the reason I changed careers was because of that officer’s death. I went and saw a professional and talked it through. I was aware of it and it bothered me, but I had technically blanked it out. We use the term today when we are helping people, [it’s] called ‘presenteeism.’ I was physically there for the [pay] cheque and that was it.”
A journalist had written articles examining the high-profile Toronto line of duty death and the later push for financial support and benefits for a second police officer’s family. Staff-Sergeant Eddie Adamson’s death also stemmed directly from the hostage taking. He died by suicide, found surrounded by his memos, notepads, and newspaper articles about Constable Sweet’s death and the hostage taking. Tortured over what did or did not happen, because of the stand down order which was followed and the force’s initial hesitation to storm the building, Staff-Sergeant Eddie Adamson tragically died by suicide in 2005.
The Globe and Mail’s Renata D’Alieso covered the case with a December 20, 2015, story entitled: FIGHT TO MEMORIALIZE POLICE PTSD VICTIMS GOES TO HUMAN RIGHTS TRIBUNAL.
Her story reads, in part:
“Each year, on the first Sunday of May, police members, political leaders and families gather on the grounds of the Ontario legislature, at a memorial made of granite and bronze, to commemorate officers who died in the line of duty.
“The CN Tower is lit in blue to honour them, and their names, which are etched in stone for permanent remembrance, are read out one by one: all 257 fallen, including 41 who served in the country’s largest municipal police force.
“Missing from the Toronto Police Service’s honour roll is Eddie Adamson, a former staff sergeant who took his life a decade ago after a long struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“The province’s Workplace Safety and Insurance Board determined Mr. Adamson’s suicide was the result of his PTSD and the board deemed his death occurred ‘on duty.’ But his family’s pleas to have him remembered in the Toronto police honour roll and memorial wall have gone unheeded. Now, the Ontario Human Rights Commission is taking up the fight, asking the province’s Human Rights Tribunal to order the Toronto police to commemorate officers such as Mr. Adamson in a case that could reverberate across the country.
“Mr. Adamson’s mental illness was triggered by the shooting of a fellow officer in a harrowing robbery and hostage taking at a downtown bistro in 1980. Mr. Adamson led an emergency police task force to the scene, but he was ordered to wait and not storm the bistro. He could hear a wounded Constable Michael Sweet beg for help. By the time the emergency team burst in, the constable couldn’t be saved.
“Police members who die by suicide because of a mental disability incurred on the job are not the only ones among Canada’s unremembered: Afghanistan war veterans who took their lives after serving in the mission are not memorialized in the same way as those who perished in theatre.
“‘We all still have this stigma around suicide. It’s still taboo,’ said former paramedic Vince Savoia, founder and executive director of The Tema Conter Memorial Trust, which assists public-safety workers and military members coping with mental illness. ‘Nobody really wants to die by suicide,’ added Mr. Savoia, who was affected by PTSD and suicidal in the past. ‘It’s the last step, God forbid, for some individuals who just feel they have nothing left to give.’”
As of September 2017, Staff-Sergeant’s Adamson’s name is still not listed on the Toronto Police Service’s Honour Roll. But that will change – after a groundbreaking decision in April 2017, which was widely reported in Canadian media, including a story by Bruce Forsyth in the online publication Canadian Military History called OVERDUE HONOUR: STAFF-SERGEANT EDDIE ADAMSON TO BE HONOURED ON THE TORONTO POLICE HONOUR ROLL.
It reads, in part:
“On 20 April 2017, the family of the late Staff-Sergeant Eddie Adamson received some long-overdue good news: Eddie will be honoured on the Toronto Police Honour Roll, something he was denied in 2005.
“Adamson’s widow Linda and daughter Julie had to fight for the recognition bestowed on Toronto Police officers who die in the line of duty because Eddie took his own life after suffering from PTSD for more [than] 25 years.
“In 2008, three years after his death, the Workplace Safety and Insurance Bureau, in an appeals ruling, officially declared that Staff-Sgt. Adamson’s death was ruled a work-related injury, brought on by post-traumatic stress related to the death of … Constable Michael Sweet in 1980. …”
The fight to include Adamson’s name on a Memorial Wall has also taken a huge step forward, as the article further explains: “On 20 April 2017, Toronto Police released the following statement: ‘Today, the Toronto Police Service has announced that a settlement has been reached with the Ontario Human Rights Commission relating to the Memorial Wall honouring fallen officers,’ said in a release from police spokesman Meaghan Gray.
“The release continued by stating: ‘By October 2017, the service will finalize a procedure that will provide a process and the specific criteria under which applications will be considered. The process will allow the name of a member who has died because of mental-health injuries, including names of those who have already passed away, to be put forward for consideration.”
It was through reading other media articles that Dave Ralph considered the exact timeline of events and his decision to leave the police job. He realized he had also been suffering from what had or had not happened in 1980. The earlier articles had brought back the details of what he had heard and he finally made the connection.
The Toronto Paramedic Services (TPS), then known as an ambulance service, was progressive, even in the 1980s, when Constable Sweet’s Line of Duty Death had occurred and when Dave made his abrupt transition from police communication work to the emergency ambulance service.
The TPS had hired a full-time clinical psychologist to support its staff of approximately nine hundred employees, according to Dave: “As I sat in a couple of her educational things, I flashed back to the officer’s line of duty death.”
He was always open to learning about trauma and to receiving support. That is why, combined with his compassion, the communicator now excels in his volunteer work with other responders, emergency personnel, military, and their families.
“That day when she’s explaining, ‘If you have these feelings, instead of going for the bottle, you should do this …’ all of this stuff is flashing back. I had drank two to three days to forget about a SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome) death and I had to teach the mother how to do CPR on h
er two-to three-month old …”
He made a commitment to learn about mental health and support for first responders, members of the military, and their families, as well as “first, first responders,” dispatchers, emergency communicators, 911 operators, and so on, starting in the 1980s, long before terms like PSTD and CIS were as commonly used or as accepted as they are today. “That’s why I volunteer with this organization. Something inside me said, You need to learn more about this and you need to understand this better.”
JL: “Did you diagnose yourself?”
DR: “Maybe.”
JL: “Trauma does not have to come from being at the thing and witnessing a scene.”
DR: “Absolutely not. Somebody who works in a large communications centre, in a twelve-hour shift, I would say in a large comm centre, a call taker would take forty to sixty percent more calls than any first responder would respond to in the field. So if a paramedic crew were to get eight calls in a twelve-hour shift, a communicator taking those calls would possibly interact with sixty to eighty cases or calls. We, in communications, interact for a shorter period of time. We interact in a non-visual environment. We are not the hands-on people. They call us the first, first responders. I like that term.”
Dave had a thirty-year career with the Toronto Paramedic Services. He is not certain, but estimated he has interacted with thousands of emergency callers over the span of the three decades.
In the early 1980s, during his training, he was told if the call was really serious to record and dispatch it as a Code 4. If it was not as critical, it was a “Code 3, if you didn’t think they were going to die,” he explained. “I learned that just because the caller screams loud doesn’t mean it’s serious.”
One of the calls he took underlined the need to develop and adhere to strict communication protocols, which evolved over time. “I had a caller tell me, ‘My baby! My baby’s not breathing!’ When I asked her how old her baby was, she said, ‘Twenty-six.’ I would have been instructing that lady how to do CPR the wrong way [for a child] over the phone, because she said it was her baby, and it probably was her first-born child. You needed a proper protocol and way to interview in a non-visual environment.”
Another example of an emergency call he answered that could have benefitted from clearer and tighter protocol came from a high-rise apartment building. “My baby! My baby’s dead!” the caller screamed hysterically at Dave over the phone. He did everything he could to help her. “This is before a structured protocol. I sent police, fire, and the ambulance service to a baby who was dead. The woman was screaming. I was calling her back. It turns out her ‘baby’ was a pet ferret that had gotten out of captivity in the apartment and a neighbour had put the boots to the ferret. Nobody told me to ask, Is your baby a human? So you need a properly driven protocol system.”
Since hearing hours of radio calls and conversations that led him to believe mistakes had been made, which resulted in a police officer’s tragic death, the veteran communicator has been devoted to ensuring protocol and procedures are properly followed.
He interviewed nine times with Toronto Paramedic Services before he was awarded a management communication position. “As I got senior in my position, I had to audit calls that weren’t good. Not that there were errors, we wanted to make sure we did it right, from a call receiving position.” His ongoing pursuit to ensure procedure was done correctly may or may not have stemmed from the line of duty death, but it is hard to imagine it has not played a role.
He became the commander of the call centre’s education group in 2004. “We couldn’t change the calls that had happened but we could try and improve moving forward,” he explained, of the mindset and work ethic that drove him during his years with TPS. Continuous Quality Improvement, as he called it, was a major part of his mandate in the 2000s.
In 1995 another event also changed his life and further fuelled his drive to ensure whatever incidents he and his colleagues were involved in were dealt with properly – a consuming passion which may have been fuelled from the trauma surrounding the police missteps. In August that year, Canada’s worst subway crash claimed three lives and injured dozens. Dave was the shift supervisor at the Toronto Paramedic Services’ call centre when the crash occurred.
The Toronto Star revisited the tragedy on the twentieth anniversary of the crash, publishing the following story, entitled 20 YEARS AFTER RUSSELL HILL, TORONTO’S DEADLIEST SUBWAY CRASH. The August 10, 2015, story, written by Lauren Pelley, reads, in part:
“On a typical late-summer night 20 years ago, thousands of Toronto residents began their evening commute in the dark underbelly of the city.
“Many didn’t make it home.
“A two-train subway crash on the Spadina line – the worst accident in the TTC’s history – left three dead, 30 hospitalized, and dozens more injured.
“For most Toronto residents, the events of Aug. 11, 1995, are long forgotten. But for those who experienced the tragedy first-hand the memories still run deep.
“The train on the receiving end of the crash was stopped at a signal light on the southbound Spadina line, just north of Dupont. The second train, thanks to a combination of mechanical and human errors, kept going – smashing into the first at a speed of nearly 50 km/h, leading to a twisted wreckage of metal filling the entire circumference of the tunnel.
“Some say it looked like a scene from a war movie.
“From within the tunnel’s stifling heat and near-darkness, dozens of passengers escaped into the summer air above, while others remained trapped in the contorted skeletons of the train cars, pinned under seats and against the aluminum frame, amid broken glass and debris.
“Christina Munar Reyes, 33, Kinga Szabo, 43, and Xian Hui Lin, 23, lost their lives in the crash. …
“Coupled with … driver error, a design flaw with the Ericsson trip arm, a safety device meant to engage the brakes of trains passing through stop signals, contributed to the crash.
“The tragedy led to sweeping changes throughout the transit system. An internal TTC (Toronto Transit Commission) investigation and coroner’s inquest resulted in 236 recommendations, all of which have since been closed out, according to the TTC’s chief safety officer, John O’Grady.
“Within the TTC, there was a culture shift, O’Grady says.
“‘ I think if you could characterize it, when we built the subway in the early ’50s it was beautiful, it was state-of-the-art, modern, new, nothing was worn out,’ he says.
“‘We got used to the TTC being one of the top subways in the world. By the time Russell Hill came along 25 years later … it was kind of a wakeup call for us, for that culture of concern [about] the state of good repair.’
“Many TTC staff were on scene that night – along with paramedics, police officers, firefighters, physicians and passersby.
“More than 280 rescuers poured into the subway tunnel and manned command posts on the surface, assisting more than 200 passengers escape the two mangled trains. The last survivors weren’t removed until after 2 a.m.
“Michael Killingsworth, a staff sergeant with the TTC’s transit enforcement unit, has attended dozens of subway suicides and homicides in his nearly 30-year career. Even so Aug. 11, 1995, is ‘the worst night I’ve ever had,’ he says.
“Retired firefighter Ken Bodrug, one of the first responders that evening, calls it a ‘horrible experience,’ but one he wouldn’t want to forget.
“‘ For the sake of the souls that never came out of there that night, I believe that all of us left a little part of ourselves down there,’ he told the Star. ‘Forgetting it just makes the memory of those people meaningless.’
“Twenty years after that night, some of those on scene offered to share their memories of the horror – and heroism – of the Russell Hill crash …,” wrote Pelley.
One of those people sharing his story and memories from the subway crash is Dave Ralph. He remembers the exact time the crash happened, down to the split second. His shift s
tarted at six in the evening. “I can tell you at 6:02:17 p.m., that is when two subways collided. I know that, down to the second, when the first call rang in,” Dave said emphatically. “The call was from the Toronto Transit Authority saying, ‘Could you come to this station and stand by? We have a report of smoke in the tunnel. We’re not sure what’s happened,’” Dave explained, paraphrasing the initial confusion.
His team of dispatchers sent an ambulance.
Several minutes went by until all hell broke loose.
There had been between two hundred and three hundred passengers on the two trains, who all had to be rescued from the implosion. It was not an explosion when the trains hit; they imploded back into themselves and the wreckage filled the narrow tunnel. There was nowhere for the force of the impact to travel but back on itself.
Some crawled out with barely inches above or below; they slid, pulled, pushed, and maneuvered in whichever way humanly possible through glass, debris, and shards of metal. The conditions facing the first responders and medical teams were hellish. Some passengers had to be cut out of the mangled wreckage and had their limbs amputated by surgeons who came to the crash site. In one case, a victim died immediately after a leg was removed. First responders struggled to work in high heat and the confined and dangerous space.
Dave said it took three to five minutes before they knew with certainty there had been a crash. “Not too many people went by ambulance to hospital because, as they evacuated the train, they popped out of these emergency exits, not the stations,” he explained, of the immediate chaotic aftermath. He said some people even self-reported to hospital and flagged cabs.
About ten o’clock that night, a call came in which started a chain of events that has drastically altered his life. “One of my staff said, ‘Dave, there’s a gentleman on the phone who’s trying to find his wife. He thinks she’s caught up in the subway system.’”
The Legacy Letters Page 16
