My Prediction

I dreamt a strange dream.
Of a country not mine.
of another day.
of another time.

I saw the next President
of the United States
and then picked up the paper
my mouth went agape...

Larger than life.
Bigger than real.
Not faster than supes.
But way more real.

anger

Otto Vass. The name may ring a bell. He died after an incident in front of a 7-11 a few summers ago. Here is how i remember the story.

A large man he left the store just as two cruisers were pulling in. One cruiser slowed and the officers started talking to Vass. The officers got out of their vehicle and started to fight with Vass. The other officers joined in and this man was beaten within an inch of his live. He died before he reached the hospital. This happened in an area i was familiar with and i knew people who knew vass.
http://www.ocap.ca/legal/vassverdict.html

I just put down the paper and while i knew the fight was on to get justice in this case i did not know what had happened to this case.

here is what I read:

Inquest dealing with Vass's demons
Oct. 17, 2006. 06:42 AM
ROSIE DIMANNO

In a darker era, without enlightenment, Otto Vass would have been viewed as possessed, as if he had the devil in him.
The rage, the ravings, the tortured soul. It is a sad commentary that, at the turn of this millennium, despite sophisticated medical intervention and a more compassionate understanding of mental illness, he was still essentially a man seized by demons, helpless.
His sickness — schizophrenia, manic depression — stole much of Vass's life and, in the end, on Aug. 9, 2000, created the circumstances for his death: An unprovoked attack on a police officer outside a west-end convenience store, the application of violence to subdue him, and a dislodged fat deposit that travelled lethally into his lungs, causing him to suffocate.
Three years ago, at a manslaughter trial against four of the cops involved, Crown attorneys argued that Vass's death was caused by the unnecessary severity of that beating. A jury disagreed and the officers were acquitted.
Yesterday, after a six-month adjournment requested by the family, a coroner's inquest to explore the circumstances of Vass's death finally began.
But not without controversy, which trails Vass even now.
The Committee for Justice for Otto Vass, a group of activists who came together immediately after the tragedy, was denied in their second, revised attempt to secure formal standing at the inquest. Only last week, the presiding coroner, Dr. William Lucas, had turned down the committee's application, ruling it had no direct and substantial public advocacy role to play at the inquest.
He did, however, grant status to the Empowerment Council, a community group that deals with "clients'' of the mental health system.
This time around, lawyer Peter Rosenthal came armed with an affidavit signed by Vass's widow, Zsuzsanna Vass, urging that Lucas grant the committee standing, arguing that it was "very well-suited'' to represent both herself and her son, 14-year-old Michael. Another son from Otto Vass's first marriage, Attila Vass, also spoke in support of the application.
Again, Lucas said no. There was no legal precedent, he pointed out, for a third-party group to qualify for standing as a de facto stand-in a for a private-interest party to the inquest. Mrs. Vass has been granted standing but has chosen, apparently for emotional and financial reasons, not to exercise it.
Rosenthal, under questioning from reporters outside the courtroom, confirmed that he is working for the committee on a pro bono basis. He added that he would do the same for Mrs. Vass, if requested. But the widow, who was present yesterday along with her son — Michael is the youngest of Otto's five children — has steadfastly rejected this obvious solution to the impasse. Even relieved of financial pressures, she doesn't want to be directly involved.
Lucas took particular issue with Rosenthal's suggestion that the inquest Crown attorney, Eric Siebenmorgen, would not vigorously represent the family's interests because, well, Crowns belong to the same law enforcement club as cops. But this is the same Crown attorney's office that charged and prosecuted those officers in the first place.
More to the point, in his judgment, Lucas observed that the committee was simply trying to circumvent his original ruling, presenting itself as an agent for Mrs. Vass, even though not directly engaged to do so. "I have a concern that this is nothing more than a thinly veiled attempt for a group to slip in the side door when the front door has been closed.''
There was also a hint of undue influence over Mrs. Vass by the Committee and that got up Rosenthal's nose. <BR>"That's one of several times in which the coroner seemed to be questioning my integrity, personally. I feel I do have integrity and he should report me to the law society if he feels I don't.''
In fact, as two committee members admitted yesterday, they had been the ones to approach Mrs. Vass after Lucas's original ruling.
If stung by Lucas's comments, Rosenthal stung right back.
"I've seen many rulings at coroner's court. In my view, this is the most disgusting one I've ever seen. In his reasons earlier, he had said that what was missing in the application was an affidavit from Mrs. Vass. Then Mrs. Vass, at great emotional strain, produces an affidavit and now they say, `Oh, that didn't really mean much.'''
Without the committee there — and its intent, clearly, is to use the inquest as a quasi-appeal apparatus, to retry the cops, which is not permitted under the Coroner's Act; indeed no findings of blame can be made — Rosenthal argues that the whole exercise will fail Vass, again. "What's lost is any possibility of arriving at a reasonable view of the facts. There's going to be police lawyers pushing everything in a given direction. The coroner's counsel is not going to seriously oppose that. And it's going to be a whitewash.''
Then Rosenthal took himself off to Divisional Court, in search of a hearing to overturn Lucas's ruling. A date of Oct. 23 was set for hearing his application.
Lucas would not adjourn the inquest, pending that Divisional Court decision.
By early afternoon, there was that familiar store security video being played in a courtroom again, a harmless-looking Vass caught by cameras as he hovered about, leaving peaceably with two officers when they enter the premises. They'd been called by the clerk and what isn't shown is what had just transpired outside — a suddenly enraged and thoroughly delusional Vass cold-cocking a complete stranger who'd been sitting in a car.
What doesn't make sense to anybody else likely made entire sense to 55-year-old Vass, who was often paranoid and apt to lash out when suffering an "episode,'' occurrences that escalated during periods when he stopped taking his medication.
"It may have made some sense to him but uniquely to him,'' said Dr. Robert Hill, a forensic psychologist, who was the first witness called.
Less than a week earlier, it was Mrs. Vass who had taken her husband to the emergency department, but he'd checked himself out. Earlier that fateful day, he'd jumped from his vehicle — leaving it to roll down a hill and crash into a wall as pedestrians scattered — because he believed there was napalm, or a bomb, planted under his seat.
The world was a terribly threatening place for Vass when he was in these agitated states and, in turn, he unleashed terror on others. His medical records — some 20 hospitalizations of various durations since the age of 19 — and his criminal record are littered with incidents of violence: He repeatedly assaulted nurses and fellow patients, cops, guards, his children, his parents. Once, he locked up three women and a baby in a house, then set fire to it, standing with his arms folded on the front lawn and smiling as they banged on the window to be released.
It was the sickness that made him wicked. At other times, he was a good husband and kind father, hard-working.
"He always laughed and put me on his shoulder,'' son Michael told reporters outside. He was 8 when his father died and says he doesn't remember the bad Otto Vass. "I never knew that. I was small. I never saw it, that he was sick, never.''
On the day Michael was born, with his mother on the maternity floor, his father was in the same hospital, in the psychiatric ward.
The inquest continues.

this has made me so angry i cannot even begin to describe the feeling.

so unfair that this has happened...

so unfair that the men responsible for this will never be brought to justice...

so wrong that we allow this sort of thing to occur in our great city...