Bob–Megaphone Sales Rep.
Choices Market–Cambie and 19th

I first met Frank Paul in June of 1993 when I started with Spare Change magazine.

I was selling Spare Change outside the Bank of Hong Kong on Granville Street near 12th Avenue. Frank would pass me and say hello when he was sober.

He would walk up Granville Street panhandling for money. He would often stop and panhandle outside a store that sold items from China.

He was not allowed outside the liquor store at 14th and Granville, but for some time he was getting his alcohol from there.

He would often drink in that area and pass out, sometimes taken away by ambulance. The police were very seldom present.

I would see it happen constantly for the next four years.

Paul was homeless (he did not like living inside) and was said to be sleeping near the liquor store and IGA at 10th and Maple.

He seemed to be a loner. Once and a while he would be seen drinking with the binners outside the 7-Eleven at 13th and Granville.

Later on, Paul would not purchase liquor at the liquor store on Granville Street—he switched to the breath-freshener, Listerine, and was panhandling for that.

Next to the Bank was a grocery store—Paul was not allowed to go in there either. He would constantly ask me to go in, but I would refuse.

I last saw Paul in 1997. He was in very rough shape, sometimes not wearing shoes, sometimes wearing the same clothes for weeks.

Paul was a nice guy, but lost. He would get very belligerent when he had been drinking. This would go on for a number of years. According to The Vancouver Sun, he had been taken into custody more than a dozen times in the months leading to his death, when he died outside in the cold behind detox in December 1998.

A rookie Vancouver Police Department constable, who was driving the Police prison wagon Paul had been in, left him there.

The wagon was needed somewhere else, and two patrol constables at the scene advised the rookie constable to leave Paul there. The constable did not admit Paul to the detox centre at the 200 block of East 1st Avenue.

Paul was found dead a few hours later by detox staff.

He had been picked up earlier, intoxicated, leaning against a store in the DTES. He was taken to the city jail, booked and dragged across the floor by police to a cell. Paul was examined by a nurse and released by Sergeant Sanderson, though he was still intoxicated.

Sanderson neglected his duty as supervisor of the jail. He only received a two-day suspension, and the rookie constable received three days. Sanderson showed no remorse, though the rookie did. The two constables were not suspended.

If police, ambulance crew and Social Services showed some concern they would’ve gotten Paul the proper help and shelter. He would be alive today.

My sympathy goes out to his family in Halifax.