The nightmare began when John Salilar shut his eyes.
He saw a dead man, without a face, in a coffin.
Then he felt somebody pulling him in to the coffin, only to have the dead man push him out and tell him, “It’s not good for you to be here.”
Another nightmare would come.
In this one, Salilar is consumed with fear of being deported to his birthplace, Liberia, where he witnessed the murders of his parents during the west African country’s civil war.
“I couldn’t do anything to help my parents because I was a kid [of] 12 years old,” he told a clinical psychologist through an interpreter in April 1995. “The head is full of pain and it feels like it is going to blow up.”
Salilar’s pain ended two weeks ago.
He died July 12 after suffering a massive stroke. He collapsed at a friend’s house in Surrey on a Wednesday and was dead by Friday. He was 46.
A doctor told friends gathered around Salilar’s hospital bed there was nothing the medical team could do to keep him alive. Half of Salilar’s brain was filled with blood.
“This is a situation where his brain has no chance to recover,” the doctor said a few hours before Salilar died. “John will never be the same person. He’ll never wake up and it’s a condition that’s terminal. That’s end of life for him.”
His death upset the two dozen people in the African-Canadian community who turned up for prayers at a Richmond mosque and subsequent burial in Chilliwack.
His many friends in the Downtown Eastside, who remembered Salilar at a memorial at the Dodson Hotel, were equally somber about their friend’s passing.
It is tragic, they say, that a man who tried to make a better life for himself in Canada never got the help or structure he needed to keep him from going to dark places.
He was assessed with a Grade 3 education, couldn’t read or write in any language and, at just over five feet tall, was an easy target for predators who inhabit the notorious East Hastings corridor.
Health records and photographs taken by friends show he was beaten a few times — the latest occurring at the Balmoral Hotel in June — and he suffered from headaches.
His situation, his friends say, was desperate.
He drank and became a prolific shoplifter, stealing food, booze and clothes for himself and friends. His lengthy criminal record is dominated by convictions for theft, with a few entries for assaults against women. The result of his downward path was jail.
That is where he spent a good portion of his life, with some of that time served while his unsuccessful claim for refugee status played out in immigration hearings.
For 21 years, he is believed to have had no fixed address and flopped on friends’ floors and couches, collected welfare at one point and was married for a short time.
Along the way, there were people such as Jean de Dieu Hakizimana who tried to steer Salilar away from the bottle, get him some housing and fulfill his dream to read and write English. Salilar, who spoke Swahili, had no identification, no work permit, no bank account, no social insurance number.
“It’s a sad, sad story for him,” said Hakizimana, a former political refugee from Rwanda who operates the Neighbourhood Care International Association from a small office on East Hastings. “It was like a war for him every day.”
But, as immigration documents reveal, Salilar was never destined to stay in Canada as long as he did.
Upon his arrival in January 1992, he told immigration officials that he stowed away on a ship from Monrovia, Liberia to Bombay, India. There, he boarded the vessel MV Hoegh Duke with four other stowaways and continued to Halifax.
Salilar disembarked with no travel documents or identification but made it to Vancouver — his friends believe by bus — and was in jail almost a year after he came to town.
A fight at a bar, where police recovered a knife from the floor, led to convictions for possession of a dangerous weapon and theft of a mickey of rum from a liquor store.
Soon after, his application to be classified as a “Convention refugee,” which applies to people unwilling to return to their home country because of fear of persecution, was rejected.
“The Government of Canada is put in a very difficult position when a person arrives at Canada’s shores as a stowaway without any documents and then provides virtually no information to assist officials in confirming or determining that person’s true identity,” said Justice Jean-Eudes Dube of the Federal Court of Canada’s trial division during a 1995 hearing. “You have been given the benefit of Canada’s refugee determination system and were found not to be a Convention refugee. The Government of Canada, therefore, has an obligation to remove you from this country.”
Despite Dube’s strong words, he stayed a charge against the shipping company responsible for transporting Salilar on his journey to Halifax. He was also unwilling to put the 28-year-old on a ship when there was no country willing to receive him.
“There is no evidence that Bombay authorities will accept him and Canadian authorities are not suggesting any other port of entry,” Dube said at the time, noting immigration officials unsuccessful attempts to confirm Salilar’s country of origin. “Thus, it does appear at this stage that without a stay [against the shipping company], Mr. Salilar would become a forlorn passenger sailing forever on the world’s seven seas.”
A removal order was initiated against Salilar in 1995 but why the Canada Border Services Agency didn’t deport him is not something the agency would discuss with the Courier.
Faith St. John, a spokesperson for the agency, said in an email that the Privacy Act sets strict parameters on what it can release about an individual’s case.
But, she said, sometimes there is a delay in removing a person because of appeals and legal proceedings, criminal matters, lack of travel documents or the government is unable to establish a person’s identity.
The same year Salilar was ordered deported, his lawyer appeared to accept his client’s fate and filed a “notice of discontinuance and withdrawal of application for leave and judicial review” with the Federal Court of Canada’s trial division.
Eighteen years later, Salilar was still here, with police very aware of his whereabouts as he continued to run afoul of the law.
Documents from immigration, the courts, health agencies, jail records and a report from a clinical psychologist all point to alcohol and the lack of structure for Salilar’s criminal behaviour.
Clinical psychologist Elizabeth Herman concluded Salilar suffered from severe post-traumatic stress disorder related to the murders of his parents and that he “self-medicated” himself with alcohol.
Herman strongly recommended Salilar be referred to therapy for the disorder and that officials ensure he followed up on his desire to join an alcoholics anonymous group.
“He will be vulnerable until a consistent therapeutic intervention becomes available to him,” Herman wrote in her 1995 report.
It’s not clear from the documents whether Salilar received treatment for his disorder or alcoholism, although lawyer Darryl Larson noted in a 1995 immigration hearing what probation did for his client.
Larson said a one-year probation order imposed on Salilar in 1993 for the bar fight offered some hope. The order included abstaining from alcohol.
“It gave him structure, it gave him duties to report — an obligation to report [to his probation officer],” Larson said in the hearing. “And as soon as he was off that, he was back into a series of problems.”
Jail records and guard reports show Salilar to be “a quiet inmate who keeps to himself.” He watched television from the back row of the common room and “tries to communicate with other inmates but finds this very hard.”
A mental health screening showed he had “limited intellectual abilities.” He participated in a “Tylenol plan” for his headaches and “could be abused, taken advantage of on [the jail] unit.”
A sentencing plan noted his “poor English skills but willing to try whatever opportunities comes his way.” He expressed a desire to learn English through a “learning group” in jail but didn’t attend “due to ill health.”
When he wasn’t in jail, Salilar — who was known as Mudi to many friends — could be found most recently at the Brandiz pub on East Hastings, where he liked to drink beer.
Though he spent time in Surrey, Burnaby and North Vancouver, he was a common sight in the Downtown Eastside.
Single mom Robin Raweater, who attended last Thursday’s memorial at the Dodson Hotel, said she met Salilar about 16 years ago at a party near Broadway and Fraser.
Raweater said Salilar provided her and her children with stolen food and clothes that she accepted because her welfare cheques couldn’t cover all her costs.
“At birthday parties, he would supply everything,” said Raweater, who now works for a moving company. “Every time he was around, there was always meat — an abundance of everything that he supplied himself.”
The day before the memorial, Moe Tully attended a ceremony at the Jamia mosque in Richmond, where he said goodbye to his friend. He lay in a casket draped in an emerald green Muslim covering.
Tully said he knew Salilar’s cousins growing up in the east African country of Tanzania. He believes Salilar’s relatives fled Liberia to Tanzania during the civil war, which devastated the country in the late 1980s and into the early 1990s.
He met Salilar in Vancouver in 1995 and the two were able to determine the family connection in Tanzania. Their last visit was last year at a Caribbean festival on the North Shore.
“He was nice to people, especially the kids,” Tully said. “We used to tell him to follow up to get his documents — to get his papers to stay here — but he wasn’t capable of doing this. It was tough for him to come here, with no family, no language.”
For Jean de Dieu Hakizimana, he believes his friend’s death illustrates how agencies tasked with the settlement of refugees in Canada ignore the plight of some newcomers.
Yes, Salilar drank, Hakizimana acknowledged. Yes, he was a thief.
“But imagine a boy who cannot write or read, who lost his parents at 12 years old and he comes to Vancouver. Immediately, he’s minus 50 per cent to fail. He needed to have good guidance to get out of that cave.”
Hakizimana then pulls out his iPhone and scrolls through photographs he took of other desperate-looking African men roaming the alleys of the Downtown Eastside.
“This guy here,” he said, stopping at a photograph, “is from Burundi. His life is degrading. He would be better to be in a camp where there is food and a shower.”
His hope is that Salilar’s story will get the attention of governments to make changes on how people who arrive on Canada’s shores are treated — whether destined to stay, or not.
He drew up a petition that people signed at Salilar’s memorial and planned to take it to Mayor Gregor Robertson’s office. He wants the mayor to set up a task force to address homelessness and other social issues affecting residents originally from Africa.
“Agencies getting all this money to help people like [Salilar] are not doing a good job for us,” he said. “John Salilar is the result. He’s dead. This is a community wake-up call.”
Final note: Current provincial court records for Salilar, whose aliases included John Sala, Abdul Mohammed Said and David Bindu Moddy Mohamed, indicate 51 files associated to him. The majority are for theft.
Salilar was scheduled to appear in courtroom 511 at the Vancouver courthouse on Oct. 18 for a trial. The charge was possession of a stolen credit card.
His record suggests he would again be going to jail.
[email protected]
twitter.com/Howellings
