MONTREAL — A hospital orderly told a coroner's inquest Wednesday that one of her colleagues deleted a video taken by Joyce Echaquan, an Indigenous patient who died at the facility last September.
The orderly, whose identity is protected by a publication ban, said her colleague confessed to deleting the Facebook video on Echaquan's phone in the hours before her death on Sept. 28, 2020.
The inquest is investigating the death of Echaquan, a 37-year-old Atikamekw mother of seven who broadcast herself on Facebook Live at the hospital northeast of Montreal as female staff were heard insulting and mocking her not long before she died.
The orderly was present the day Echaquan died and told the inquest the patient's condition changed rapidly that morning. Echaquan was calm around breakfast before allegedly yelling and repeatedly hitting her head against a wall by mid-morning, she said.
She said Echaquan was given a sedative and transferred to a private room.
"You could see in her eyes, they were empty, she wasn't there," the orderly said.
She attended to other patients and around 11 a.m., she said she found Echaquan restrained by all four limbs to the hospital bed. The orderly said she was asked to get a fifth restraint to secure Echaquan's abdomen.
She told the inquiry she didn't know why hospital staff went from giving Echaquan a sedative to restraining the patient to a bed. A restrained patient, she said, is supposed to be under constant surveillance but Echaquan was left alone. "There was no one with her," the orderly testified.
The orderly said it was then when her colleague, in a state of panic, told her she had been filmed by Echaquan and had deleted the video. She said her colleague told her: "She filmed everything," referring to Echaquan, before adding, "I deleted it."
The orderly said she told her supervisor what her colleague had said about deleting the video.
She said the morning of the day Echaquan died was chaotic. The orderly said she was attending to 38 patients alone because her colleagues were on break. Just before noon, she said she was asked to check on Echaquan.
The patient's daughter was in the room and the orderly said it was clear there was something seriously wrong. The orderly said she told her colleagues Echaquan wasn't breaking and told Echaquan's daughter to follow along as she wheeled the stretcher into the reanimation room.
To this day, the orderly said she doesn't know how Echaquan died. The cause of death has not been made public.
The orderly said since Echaquan's death, there has been fear between the Indigenous Atikamekw community and hospital staff. "They are afraid of us and we are afraid of them."
She said it's sad it took a death for something to change, adding that she believes hiring more Atikamekw staff at the hospital would be helpful.
“What I want to understand is why they’re afraid … Why are they afraid of me? Why are they afraid to get care?" the orderly asked. “It’s been a long time that we’ve been hearing this, it’s about time we deal with it.”
This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 19, 2021.
Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press
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