THURSDAY, MAY 26, 2011
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Floating feet belonged to two Surrey men Mystery of severed feet can finally be put to rest – and why we should revisit ‘no foul play’ policy ViewPoint Tom Zytaruk Now staff
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Four-year-old Kaden Scott of Aldergrove tips his hat Sunday at the Cloverdale Rodeo and Country Fair. Organizers are looking back on a “fantastic” rodeo, despite having had to compete with two Vancouver Canucks playoffs games. Attendance at the fairgrounds was up by roughly 5,000 over last year’s rodeo, making for a total of more than 77,000 visitors. See the full story on page 4 and to see “40 fantastic rodeo moments,” visit thenownewspaper.com. (Photo: LISA KING)
B.C. politics
Falcon: HST cut will ‘hopefully’ sway voters Tom Zytaruk
Now staff twitter@thesurreynow
SURREY – Liberal Finance Minister Kevin Falcon hopes a two per cent cut to the 12 per cent HST by 2014 will be a tantalizing enough carrot to dissuade taxpayers from voting to dump the controversial tax when referendum
ballots are mailed out next month. “It should be hopefully enough to bring the majority of the public on board,” said Falcon, MLA for Surrey-Cloverdale. An “improved” and “marched-down” HST will be cut by one per cent on July 1, 2012, and by another one per cent on July 1, 2014. see RALSTON › page 3
bout those severed feet washing ashore... The Surrey RCMP receives some 2,200 reports of missing people each year and of those, 2,190 are usually solved in short order. Some get ink, but there’s usually no follow-up stories on those cases involving people who’ve taken their own life, as the police and media tend to do a weird little dance around the topic. Not always, but often, I’ve found, “no foul play” is used as a euphemism for suicide. In 2009, while working on a special report on missing people in Surrey, I contacted a woman whose brother had been missing for several years already to see if she might want to participate, in the hope of discovering new clues as to his whereabouts. She replied that it wasn’t necessary, as authorities had confirmed he was one of the people whose feet had been found. She then pleaded with me not to connect his name to the story, fearing the media would hound her family, given the morbid curiosity the mystery had generated on an international scale. This Tuesday, the BC Coroners Service issued a press release revealing that two of the seven severed feet that had drifted out into the saltchuk belonged to a Surrey man. The cat’s out of the bag, I thought. Further down, the release identified the deceased as a 21-year-old Surrey resident who’d been reported missing in January 2004. What a shock! This was somebody else! On Wednesday, Coroner Stephen Fonseca confirmed for me that there were indeed two Surrey residents whose feet were found, but he
wouldn’t reveal their names out of respect for their families. How they met their end has yet to be classified, Fonseca said. “We haven’t got there yet.” Strangely enough, these men had lived not far from one another. They might have even seen each other at a local mall. As for the 21-year-old, according to our newspaper’s records, police found the likely candidate’s car abandoned on the Alex Fraser Bridge before sunrise with its doors locked and hazard flashers on. You don’t have to be Columbo to figure out that if one jumped, fell or was pushed off the Alex Fraser and plunged to the water far below, it would be like hitting a sheet of pavement and ankles would most probably be broken. I think the floating feet mystery can be put to rest. Perhaps the reluctance of authorities and the media to venture beyond the realm of “no foul play” has helped keep it lingering for so long. Who knows? Compared with other countries, Canada’s homicide rate is spectacularly low, but not so with suicide. I’m not saying any of these people killed themselves. Really, how could I know? What I am saying is maybe the time has come for society to pull the touchy subject of suicide out of its dark closet so desperate people can seek help without fear of condemnation.
tzytaruk@thenownewspaper.com
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