Barry Miller: Dead and Gone

Photo:  Barry Miller having a sandwich at the Army & Navy food floor around Christmas 2007

“If you see Kelly, tell him to pay me back the $20 he owes me or I’ll slash his tires,” Barry Miller said, laughing.   I told Kelly.  That was a month ago.  A few days ago, Kelly dropped by Solheim Place apartments on Union St. and buzzed the manager to ask if Barry was around.  "Ooooh, he's gone," the manager replied in a solemn voice which Kelly imitated for me today.  “Maybe he's gone to Ontario; I'll try again in two or three days,” Kelly told the manager and took off.    

Shortly after that, Kelly heard a group of guys talking about the “man with the cats” dying.  That was Barry.  The word was he'd had a heart attack.  

So when Kelly spotted me today, he stopped on his bike and said, "You know Barry, the guy I owed the twenty bucks to?  He’s dead!”  Kelly's voice cracked.

A neighbour of Barry's at Solheim Place has since said that he had a heart attack at roughly 5:30 in the morning and was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.      

The last time I talked to Barry was about a week ago when I spotted him sitting on a bench in front of a bank on Main St. at Pender.  I believe he said during that conversation that he was 69 years old. 

  

Barry enjoyed his cats, his Canada Pension, and going to restaurants.  I remember him counting down the years and then the months until he got his Canada Pension.  With his pension, he saw life as Easy Street.  He didn't go to Carnegie Center as much.  He ate in restaurants more.  He told me he liked the Slocan restaurant up at Nanaimo and Hastings.  Kelly mentioned today that he'd seen Barry at the Slocan with a "big spread" in front of him.

“It was death by knife and fork,” said Kelly, shaking his head.  “I’ve seen it so many times.”  

I thought of Barry buying coffee at McDonalds and using half a cup of cream.  

Barry fed his cats well too.  Even before he got the pension, he would buy them a case of Fancy Feast, the tiny tins, every month at the Tisol Pet store on Main at 12th.  And he always had lots of dried food for his cats too.  

He used to have coffee at McDonald’s with Kelly who had been raised as though he were one of a litter of cats. Kelly's parents in New Brunswick had a huge number of children and would sometimes give one away to a relative who visited.  He said that practice wasn’t unusual were he grew up.     

Barry had been a drinker but quit a few years back.  He had helped the Downtown Eastside Residents Association drink the Metropole Hotel into the ground.  DERA owned the hotel until it went bankrupt and when Barry would drop in, staff from DERA would be drinking in there and would offer him beer on the house.  

Barry liked the DERA crowd.  He thought Terry Hanley, the former Director of DERA, was attractive.  He would occasionally ask people, “Do you ever see Terry Hanley around?”, with a twinkle in his eye.  He had always gotten along ok with her spouse too, Eric.  He used to drink with them.

Up until his death, Barry was working for DERA cleaning and painting suites when people moved out.  The building he lived in, Solheim Place, was run by DERA.  He told me that once when he was doing some work for DERA, the current Director Kim Kerr told him,”I’m gay”, as though he thought it might be an issue with Barry.  Barry responded, “I’ll know where to go if I ever want a bl*w job."   Kerr laughed.

Two other people Barry liked were Margaret "Muggs" Sigurdson and Bob Sarti, who had a house in Strathcona and had helped run Carnegie Center for years.  He used to drive out to Fort Langley with Muggs in her truck to help pick up a load of eggs. They would bring them back to the Dug Out drop-in center at Powell & Columbia; low income people could buy a carton of large eggs there for about $1.75. Then Muggs and Bob moved to Hornby Island.  The Dug Out no longer sells eggs.     

Like many Downtown Eastsiders, Barry had a less than stellar start in life.  His mother had died in childbirth so his aunt raised him for about a decade.  Then he got passed around. That was in Ontario, near Orillia.   

Barry got in trouble a lot when he was young, but he wasn't a hardened criminal.  The whole time I knew him, he was living a straight life.  When he was young, he and a pal were picked up by the cops in Ontario,  and one of the cops flicked his finger on Barry's eyeball, on purpose. It hurt bad, Barry told me.  He lost the sight in that eye.  But you wouldn't know that from looking at him.  

Barry knew Downtown Eastside Enquirer bloggers and contributors but he never read a blog in his life. He would just shoot the breeze with us in McDonalds while he drank his coffee.  

When I heard today that Barry had died, I thought of his cats.  If there was any unfinished business in his life, it would be finding a good home for those cats. He loved his cats.

Downtown Eastside Man Collecting Beer Cans says Police Ignored Stabbing Victim Bleeding to Death on Street

When I read that a Vancouver Police spokesman told reporters that Tyson Edwards had been “rushed” to hospital after being stabbed around 2:30 a.m. on Feb. 1, I thought of a man collecting beer bottles and cans that night who tells a different story.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 Roughly ten days after 21 year old Tyson Edwards, who was becoming a dog-trainer like his father who has worked with the dogs of Marilyn Manson and Sheryl Crow, was stabbed to death outside Richards on Richards nightclub in Vancouver, I heard Jim A. talking about how the cops hadn’t seemed too interested.  ”Are you talking about that young Black guy who got stabbed?”, I asked Jim when I overheard his conversation in the Carnegie Library on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.  I had seen the victim’s mother on the front page of the Vancouver Sun pleading for witnesses to come forward, and his father who had come up from Los Angeles standing in the background. “He was Black or East Indian,” Jim said, “It happened two weekends ago; there’s a memorial outside Richards on Richards.”  He was talking about Tyson Edwards.                                                                                                                                                                                                         Jim, a thin white guy in his fifties, who unlike some Downtown Eastsiders doesn’t make a habit of criticizing police, had been walking around downtown collecting empty beer cans and bottles.  He arrived at Richards on Richards just after Edwards was stabbed.  ”I saw him lying in the curb,” says Jim, who didn’t witness the actual stabbing. There were no police or other emergency workers there yet.  ”I felt for the guy…As soon as I saw him, I could see he needed an ambulance.  ”Take it easy”, Jim said to Edwards and then went for help. “The first thing on my mind was the guy needed an ambulance”.  As Jim walked away, he heard somebody yelling, “He’s dying, he’s dying.”               

                                                   

Photo: A VPD constable at Richards on Richards on Sunday, Feb. 1.  Edwards had been stabbed at roughly 2:30 that morning.

Jim told the doorman at Richards on Richards that there was a man who needed an ambulance. "I told the door man, the Black door man, he was the first one I told,” Jim says.  ”He just ignored me.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

“Then a cop pulled up and I said, ‘This guy needs an ambulance, he’s been stabbed in the chest and he’s bleeding; they [the people with Edwards] rolled him over, he needs an ambulance right now’.”  Jim dipped his hand into his pocket to imitate the constable’s response: “He reaches into his pocket and pulls out his radio and says, ‘I need back up.’  And he puts the radio back in his pocket.”  He didn’t call for an ambulance.                                                                                                                                                                                       

“I was kind of frantic to get an ambulance right away”, Jim says.  

Jim went up to another white male cop, “a big, bald, guy” who had just arrived, and told him that there was a guy over there that needed an ambulance right away, that he’d been stabbed in the chest.  ”He friggin’ ignored me,” Jim says.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                   Next Jim approached a white female cop who was talking to a civilian male; she was either checking his ID or searching him; Jim couldn't remember exactly.  He told her that there was a guy over there who needed an ambulance right away, that he had been stabbed in the chest.  But she, like the male cops, ignored him. “She was more interested in crowd control”, Jim said in a disgusted tone of voice.”                                                                                                                                                                                                           

I told at least three cops and none of them paid any attention”, Jim says.  He was clearly still upset.  I heard him telling his story to friends on three separate occasions.   

Maybe somebody had already called 911 and the police knew that an ambulance was on the way, I said.  Jim replied that he had noticed people with cell phones but, based on his estimation that “15 to 20 minutes” passed before an ambulance arrived, he speculates that they may have asked for police, not an ambulance.  ”It took so dammed long for the ambulance to get there, I couldn’t believe it.”  He said there is a building just a few blocks from there where ambulances are dispatched and he believes he could have walked over there, gotten hold of some ambulance attendants and walked back, and “would have been there faster than the ambulance.”  [Ambulance paramedics recently threatened to strike, one of their grievances being that ambulance response times are becoming slower.]                                                                                                                                                                      

Regardless of whether an ambulance was in transit, Jim believes police should have checked on Edwards right away, after being told that he had been stabbed and needed immediate medical help.  He says Edwards was obscured from the view of police by “a crowd of Black guys standing around him.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

Jim was amazed at the amount of back-up that arrived for police.  ”I’ve seen back up before but I’ve never seen so much back-up. There were cop cars everywhere, lights flashing, paddy wagons, but no ambulance.”      

                                                                    Photo:  Tyson Edwards' mother points to a photo of the two of them at his funeral in Burnaby.                                                                                                                                            

Jim was “perturbed” by the conduct of police as the victim lay bleeding on the curb and would later mention it to a journalist at the scene.  ”I told the CBC guy about it and he just laughed.  I said, ‘It’s not funny, a guy lost his life’.”                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Jim readily acknowledges that he’d had a bit to drink that night. “But I wasn’t drunk,” he says. When he’s picking cans and bottles on weekends, he explained, it’s common to find a half empty mickey or bottle of wine that bar-goers have left in an alley or parking lot.  He generally sips on one while he walks around picking cans.  Jim has lived on the Downtown Eastside for 30 years and he is known as a guy who enjoys going to the Pacific or the Regent Hotel to drink beer.  But he is not known to get aggressive or nasty when he drinks.  And he’s not a drug user; he even hates marijuana.                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Before the ambulance arrived, Jim left the scene and walked around the block picking up more cans and bottles.  When he passed by Richards on Richards again, he saw that the ambulance had arrived.  ”The ambulance was there; it was behind yellow tape”, he said in a low voice.                                                                                                                                                                          There’s an old tv show in which each episode ends with a male voice saying, “There are eight million stories in the naked city, you’ve just heard one of them.”  There are also millions of sides to those stories.  You’ve just heard one of them.     

Before Tracy's Death, the Dealth of a Homeless Man on Tuesday went Unreported

Apparently a homeless death on Tuesday night went unreported by the media.

The following was posted today on the blog davideby.blogspot.com:

"From Stephanie, a regular reader and plugged in DTES resident, worker and observer:

I'm sorry to report this, but there was a death Tuesday night that didn't make the media - I found out about it Wednesday night from a colleague who works for an agency that serves people with mental illness. Three people went to sleep together, and only two of them woke. Apparently the young man who died was here from up north and had only been in town four or five days."