A Regina business owner says he is deeply disturbed after his security cameras captured a man apparently trying to flag down passersby for help for several hours before he died out in the cold late last month.
“When you see a guy sitting there, and you’re watching him die on video, it’s not a TV show — it’s real life, so it’s going to hit you,” Jeff Holt said in a Thursday interview.
“What kind of society are we?” he remembers asking himself when he saw the footage.
The video, which Holt shared with CBC News, appears to show the man talking briefly with a driver on a bus around 8 p.m. on Dec. 30. The video then shows the man stumbling out the rear door of the bus and falling onto a lawn on Fourth Avenue E.
The bus waits for a couple of seconds before driving away from the man, who appears to be unable to get up on his own.
Over the following hours, several pedestrians, vehicles and at least three more city buses can be seen in the surveillance footage passing by the man, but none stopped for more than seven hours.
Around 3:30 a.m. on Dec. 31, a cyclist passing by stopped and checked on the man, according to the footage, and called emergency services.
Yup, happened to me. Unfortunately, “apparently-homeless” usually means someone who’s drunk or strung out on drugs.
If you do end up getting killed trying to help someone who’s under the influence, your family may not get any justice at all.
You pretty much always have to either call the police or ambulance and not interact with someone in need. It sucks, but that’s the world we live in.
The only three times I stayed with the person while waiting for emergency services, there were either other people around, the person was unconscious, and one old lady who was lost seemed to have dementia and wasn’t a threat to me.