The mother of Robert Dziekanski, whose death after a confrontation with RCMP officers 12 years ago sparked a public inquiry and prison sentences, has died during a visit to her home country of Poland.
A lawyer who represented Zofia Cisowski in her years-long quest for justice and accountability confirmed the 73-year-old had died on Nov. 18 after suffering a stroke in her Polish residence, and then another in hospital.
“It’s just shocking and sad news,” Bill Sundhu told Global News from Kamloops, where Cisowski lived for most of the year.
Sundhu said Cisowski will be buried in Poland next to her only son. A small memorial ceremony will be held Friday by the Polish community in Kamloops.
Cisowski immigrated to Canada in 1999, and had formalized a plan for her son to join her in 2007.
When he got off a plane on Oct. 14 of that year, Dziekanski — who didn’t speak English and had never travelled before — got lost for more than nine hours inside Vancouver International Airport.
A frustrated outburst drew a response from four RCMP officers, who stunned Dziekanski multiple times with a Taser within moments of their arrival. The 40-year-old died of a heart attack as a result.
Sundhu said he met Cisowski a month after the incident and helped her mount a civil lawsuit against the RCMP.
“She was, and remained to this very day, a grieving mother,” he said.
“She was very brave, courageous. She had a sense of humour. But I always felt when I observed her, you know, like her physical demeanour, her emotional demeanour, that she was a grieving mom, that she internalized that. There was a huge gap, an emptiness in her life.”
The mother’s regular appearances in the media also helped spark a provincial inquiry in 2010, which found the officers were wrong to use a Taser and had misrepresented their actions to the inquiry.
While all four officers were charged with perjury based on the inquiry’s findings, two were cleared of the charges at trial. Kwesi Millington, the officer who used the Taser, and Benjamin Robinson, the ranking officer at the scene, received jail terms.
Millington received 30 months in prison while Robinson was handed a two-year sentence, a year of probation and 240 hours of community service. Both men appealed but were unsuccessful.
The inquiry also led to the creation of the Independent Investigations Office, which is tasked with investigating police-involved deaths or injuries. New restrictions on the use of Tasers by police were established as well.
Sundhu credited Cisowski for those reforms, saying she leaves behind a legacy that will ensure other mothers won’t go through what she did.
“She brought about meaningful change through a terrible and horrific loss for herself, that hopefully will reduce deaths and serious bodily harm when people are in encounters with police, and to hold police authorities accountable so that we have public confidence in the quality of our law enforcement,” he said.
“It’s a sad day. But that will be her legacy, I think, one of respect and gratitude for her courage and the terrible, tragic loss that she suffered.”