From Friday's Globe and Mail
Brian Minchin said his son, Michael Langan, was as healthy as a horse, and used to walk four or five miles a day in pursuit of aluminum cans, trying to scrounge together enough money for some beer and marijuana.
He said his son may have been drunk or high on marijuana when he was confronted by two police officers in an alley close to the National Microbiology Laboratory in
He was pronounced dead on arrival at a
Recent
"He was asked to drop the knife or something and he didn't do it. I guess they asked him several times. Maybe he was drunk. He probably was drunk because he gets kind of crazy and brave when he's drunk," he said. "People think they're Superman when they're drunk, even adults."
Mr. Minchin wants to know why police didn't try to use means other than a taser to disarm his son.
"They're trained to disarm people. He doesn't have a gun. He's not 6 foot 5. He's a 5-foot-4 kid," he said. "They didn't have to tase him. Now I have no son. Seventeen years old!"
Mr. Minchin, who is Métis, said his son had a problem with authority figures of all types, and may have hesitated when told to drop a weapon. But he wonders why police could not have waited a little longer before shocking him with 50,000 volts.
"They said they tasered him once in the chest," he said. "Obviously the taser is the reason he had this heart attack or whatever. He had no heart problems. He was a perfectly healthy 17-year-old kid."
Mr. Langan had been living with his father in a Point Douglas rooming house for the past few weeks, ever since he and his mother returned to
In the meantime, Mr. Langan spent a lot of time with his father, who panhandles in an area off
His father says somewhat sheepishly that their relationship wasn't perfect. They sometimes smoked marijuana together, and he recognizes his own substance-abuse problems. Hope for his son's future was all he had, Mr. Minchin said.
He said he doesn't have many memories of his son, but will always cherish the thought of the day they spent together when the Grey Cup was last in
When the police told him his son had died, he was heartbroken.
"I just started crying, 'No, no, he can't be dead.' "
An official cause of death has yet to be released by the provincial medical examiner. Reports from the scene suggested Mr. Langan was bleeding from the head, but Mr. Minchin believes it was his heart that failed.
It's strange, he said, because his son always used to say he would die young.
The incident began when two citizens saw someone police say was Mr. Langan breaking into a car outside a garment factory a few blocks from the spot where he died. The two men followed him for several minutes and flagged down a passing police car. The officers took over the chase and confronted Mr. Langan in a back alley adjacent to the grounds of the laboratory.
Minutes later, witnesses said, they were pounding on his chest trying to revive him with the help of paramedics.
Two officers have been placed on administrative leave while the incident is investigated by the
David Chartrand, president of the Manitoba Métis Federation, said yesterday that there are questions about whether racial profiling was a factor in the case. But at a news conference yesterday, Winnipeg Police Chief Keith McCaskill played down the racial angle, saying everyone must wait for the full investigation to unfold.
"Certainly if you look at the specifics that we can provide you, we had two citizens approach the police, direct them to a certain person and that's where [officers] went," Chief McCaskill said.
Mr. Minchin said he plans to sue the police.