Police screw the pooch, man jailed unjustly

[Scooter]

The Keystone Cops are at it again:

OTTAWA — Moments after Marian Andrzejewski was beaten by a pair of thugs in a home invasion, he called 911. Getting help turned out to be a lot harder than he could have imagined: not only was he poorly treated by the people he called for help, before the day was through, he found himself in jail — a crime victim accused of being a criminal himself.

It was about 3 p.m. on Oct. 23, 2010, when two men burst through the door of Andrzejewski’s public housing unit on the 14th floor of a building on Rochester Street. As he begged for his life, they punched him repeatedly in the head, and left him bloodied and in pain on the floor.

Andrzejewski, a 74-year-old Polish-born painter whose work has been featured at the Canadian War Museum, managed to get to the telephone to call 911, telling the operator that he needed help, that two attackers had broken into his home and he was suffering from eye and nose injuries.

The 911 call, obtained by the Citizen, was to last 13 minutes, much of it an exercise in frustration for Andrzejewski, whose first language is Polish. The operator herself seemed to have sensed the frustration on the other end of the line, telling Andrzejewski at one point to “take a deep breath.”

Even so, it took the operator more than three minutes to ask Andrzejewski his first language, to which he immediately replied: Polish. And even after that, the operator, for reasons unexplained, did not access the police department’s direct line to a round-the-clock translation service that kicks in within seconds.

As the call went on, Andrzejewski kept apologizing, saying that, “My English is not good,” and repeating that he couldn’t understand what the operator was saying.

“Well, listen to the question,” the operator is heard telling him at one point.

Although he had already detailed his injuries after the operator asked early in the call, she later asked again whether he was hurt and needed to go to a hospital. “Do you know what a hospital is?” she asked him.

When he kept answering, “Yes,” to some of her questions, the 911 operator demanded in exasperation: “Quit saying yes. Stop it. No, no more yes.”

Then the 911 operator conceded she was having trouble following what he was saying. “It’s hard for me to help you because I can’t understand what you’re trying to tell me,” she said.

When he explained that two men “broke in my door,” for example, she thought he was saying his door was broken. “So they just opened it?” the 911 operator asked. Then, she added: “How come you didn’t get your door fixed?”

Interview by the Citizen through a translator last week, Andrzejewski described the way the Ottawa Police 911 call was handled as “scandalous” and “shameful” — “it was like torture.”

Ottawa Police Supt. Mike Flanagan, who listened to the 911 call after being contacted by the Citizen, said that “on the surface of it, I have some issues about how the call was handled.” He promised the force would do a “full and complete” investigation.

“Our 911 operators are professionals,” he said. “They are the public’s lifeline and they take pride in it. They take 250,000 calls a year and are often dealing with people who are anxious and fearful. Having said that, we expect that when people call for help, they get the help they need right away.”

Near the end of the call, the 911 operator asks Andrzejewski to stay on the line until police get there. Looking out from his apartment, he replied that he could see the police were already in front of the building.

But it seemed they hadn’t come to help him. Rather than go up to his apartment immediately, the officers remained outside talking to one of the attackers who, it was later revealed, had punched Andrzejewski at least 15 times. They were also interviewing the attacker’s mother, Gale Doherty, an admitted crack addict for 30 years whose street name is Hollywood.

She told police that Andrzejewski had held her against her will and sexually assaulted her. She didn’t mention her six criminal convictions for forging cheques, theft and obstructing police. But she did accuse Andrzejewski of pulling out her hair and pulling back her fingernails. The police took photographs of her scalp and hands.

Appearing to take the woman at her word, the police then went upstairs to see Andrzejewski. He was taken to hospital and then arrested and questioned for four hours. According to Andrzejewski, one officer tried to bait him, saying a video taken in the apartment would reveal the truth about what happened. There was no video and Andrzejewski stuck to his story.

Even so, they eventually charged him with unlawful confinement and sexual assault and took him to the old Innes Road jail, where he spent 75 days waiting for a bail hearing. A jury recently found him not guilty.

The trial heard testimony from Dr. Guy Genier, an Ottawa coroner for more than 40 years. Genier examined the Ottawa Police forensics proof book on the case, which included photographs of the injuries claimed by Hollywood.

The doctor, declared an expert witness, testified there was no evidence of trauma to her scalp or fingernails. Her fingernails were raised, he said, because of a “fungal infection.”

During the trial, one of the attackers testified that he couldn’t recall if he hit Andrzejewski but later, under cross-examination by defence lawyer James Harbic, he admitted he punched the older man at least 15 times.

The attacker told court he broke down the door to rescue his mother, who claimed said she went up to Andrzejewski’s apartment to collect some dishes he was giving away, only to be confronted by his demands for sex.

The jury sided with Andrzejewski’s account, which began with a letter from Ottawa’s public housing authority asking him to clean up his seriously crammed apartment.

In an interview with the Citizen, Andrzejewski said he had nothing growing up, as an adult he developed a habit of keeping everything, including a huge selection of painting frames. During the Nazi occupation, he lived for five years in hiding, mostly in an old barn and sometimes in a forest where he went without food for up to four days at a time.

In response to the housing authority’s order that he remove the clutter from his apartment, which it declared a fire hazard, Andrzejewski went down to the lobby and told Hollywood she should get a box and come up to get some things he needed to get rid of.

He says when she got inside his apartment, she demanded $10. He refused. And even if he’d had some extra money, he said he wouldn’t have given it to her because he knew she’d spend it on crack.

He grabbed her by the arm and escorted her out of his unit and locked the door. Minutes later, he said, she returned with two men who kicked in the door and beat him up. He said he hasn’t been that afraid since fleeing the Nazis in occupied Poland during the Second World War.

“They would shoot and there were bodies everywhere. In this case, I thought these (intruders) were going to kill me. It was the realization that you might die that scared me,” he said in an interview.

“And when the police came, they arrested me. I told them that assailants don’t call 911 for help, victims do. And I was the victim. The most difficult part of all of this was thinking that I may go to jail for something I didn’t do.”

Andrzejewski does not have a criminal record. In fact, it is the first time Andrzejewski has had any kind of serious problem since moving to Canada in 1987.

After conquering hardship in Poland, Andrzejewski said he chose Canada for two reasons: the stories of Anne of Green Gables that left him with the impression that Canada is filled with good people, and because of the common Polish expression, “If it’s well-made, it must be made in Canada.”


Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/Frigh ... z1uzOEzpLG

Assholes. You should hear the bitch on the 911 call. She and the police involved should all lose their jobs. Oh yeah, and he should sue for false arrest and malicious prosecution, and take all of their homes, plus a few million of the city's money.

[Jarlaxle]

Everyone responsible for this travesty should be tortured to death.

[Lord Jim]

This man deserves a very handsome settlement.

I hope he gets to spend the remainder of his golden years in the south of France.

[dgs49]

An all around cluster fuck.

Been here 25 years and still can't communicate in English?

O Canada...

[Big RR]

Plenty of people in Quebec who spent their life in Canada and can't communicate in english, yet they're still good Candians and worthy of rights under the law. But his lack of facility in English is the only comment you can make?

[dales]

Speaks volumes......

[Crackpot]

Scooter you start threads like this and then you wonder why dgs has problems understanding beastiality?

[Lord Jim]

Plenty of people in Quebec who spent their life in Canada and can't communicate in english

Yeah, I spent some time in Montreal...

Buncha frog wannabes...

Almost as rude as the real thing.....

[Jarlaxle]

The problem in Quebec being...they dont actually speak FRENCH, either!

[Crackpot]

That's not what they claim

[BoSoxGal]

Wow, really?

A long weekend I spent in Quebec City was one of the nicest of my life. We stayed in a very European-style B&B and were probably the only native English speakers there. All the folks we encountered that weekend were very gracious, despite it being the height of Dubya's illegal warmongering when we visited.

I can't wait to visit France.

[Crackpot]

Yes it's true they claim to speak a purer form of French than the French.

[dales]

I can't wait to visit France.

I'd rather enjoy a bad meal in England.

[Sue U]

Yes it's true they claim to speak a purer form of French than the French.

I rather like Canadian French; I find it more modern and immediately expressive than Parisian French, although somehwat less elegant.

[Guinevere]

I prefer the Parisian french, and in fact that's what I was first taught. In my third year of french, my teacher was a French-Canadian, and merde, do they massacre that beautiful language.

Montreal is a beautiful city, a place we visited regularly when living in Vermont for some real big city civilization. And yes, it felt almost as civilized as Paris (although a bit colder).

[Sue U]

Ha, I had a French teacher who was Alsatian and spoke with something like a German accent when she forgot to be oh-so proper. (But that was the year that the language finally "clicked" for me, like a light switch turned on in my head.)

[Gob]

Ha, I had a French teacher who was Alsatian and spoke with something like a German accent when she forgot to be oh-so proper.

[Lord Jim]

Now that's just wrong....

[Scooter]

A German Shepoodle

[Jarlaxle]

That's not what they claim

My grandmother speaks grammatically-perfect Parisian French (her mother spoke only French), my aunt spoke passable French. A trip to Montreal resulted in frustration: the locals could understand THEM, but they could not make heads or tails of Quebequois "French".