Police Beat Me Up Pretty Bad (Part 4 of 5)

Peaceful trucker suffered permanent harm, could have been left paralyzed.

Part 1: You Can See Me from the Moon

Members of the public near Csaba’s truck during the Ottawa protest. Photo by me.

Csaba Vizi was arrested around 9:30 am. Anna, his wife, was with their daughters in an Ottawa hotel room. “We saw his arrest live. I saw his beating, I don’t know if he’s OK,” she remembers. He had left his phone with her, and she didn’t know where to call for information. She remembers pacing “up and down in our hotel room for hours. Even my mother-in-law called me from Romania. Because in Romania, they show his arrest right away on the national TV – not on Facebook or some podcast or whatever.” Was it true her son had been arrested?

“I said, ‘Yes, it’s true. Don’t worry, everything is under control.’ She said, ‘What do you mean, under control?’ So I tried to calm her down. I was exhausted.”

Anna had heard that those arrested were being dumped “somewhere in the middle of nowhere. Was Csaba even able to walk?” She didn’t know. Sometime after 4 pm that afternoon, “I receive a phone call from unknown number.” He’d borrowed someone’s phone on the sidewalk. “The guy helped him out. Then my daughter went and picked him up.”

If the police didn’t run the engine on the paddy wagon, Csaba says, “No heat came in. And after a while, sitting on that hard aluminum interior, it was very, very hard to handle. They kept us for a few hours in that truck before they proceed with us.” Eventually, they were driven to “a warehouse, not a police station, a warehouse,” where they were removed from the vehicle one at a time.

“They took fingerprints, they took some pictures, they told you what you are being charged with. And then they left us in the street.” During his arrest, he lost his hat and his hoodie got torn. “After they released me, I was in that extreme cold for hours, you know, with this short hair. I was thinking probably my ears they gonna fall off because they was froze. It wasn’t a good experience at all. It was painful.”

Csaba was charged with mischief, disobeying a court order, and resisting arrest. He almost laughed out loud, he says, when they told him the last one. “Resisting arrest. Since when is it a crime in Canada to breathe while they arrest you? That was my only resistance.”

He was eager to let his family know he was OK. His daughters, he says, were “really shocked and scared.” Once back at the hotel, “I didn’t feel any pain, nothing.” But in the middle of the night, “I peed blood. It was scary, I never saw that before.”

By morning, he felt like he’d been hit by a train, “Everything was sore.” Twenty-four hours after that, Anna had to help him get out of bed. Worried about internal bleeding, she insisted he see a doctor. “I said, I don’t care, you have to go.”

This, of course, was a minefield. Not only was Csaba unvaccinated, he was a trucker. “I had my phone in my hand,” he recalls, when he showed up in the Emergency Department of an Ottawa hospital. Due to COVID protocols, Anna wasn’t permitted inside the building.

“I didn’t know how they gonna treat me. And I was thinking I’m gonna film the whole interaction. A nurse saw me with the phone and called security.” When the guard inquired, Csaba told him it was “in case you have any problems with me. I don’t know what’s gonna happen. If you want, I can make you famous.”

Matters de-escalated, he says, and he didn’t feel the need to push the record button. “I have to wait in the Emergency room the whole night. Only in the morning, I get the bed. I was almost falling asleep, but I had to keep myself awake because I said maybe they gonna vaccinate me.”

When he finally saw a doctor and explained that the “police beat me up pretty bad, you should see how the doctor talk to me after that.” His tone was hostile, contemptuous. Without a trace of sympathy. “They X-rayed my chest because I couldn’t breathe after the beating for a while. I thought some bone broken in my chest. He looked at the results and said ‘I don’t see nothing.’” When Csaba insisted something was wrong, the doctor shrugged. Maybe there was a fracture that wasn’t evident on the X-ray. “Just go home and take Tylenol.”

During the week in which his truck was impounded, the swelling in Csaba’s left wrist failed to subside. Back in Windsor, another hospital X-rayed it. “Oh, you have a broken bone. So they put me in some kind of cast. But that was terrible. During the night, I wake up in pain. I take it off, go back to sleep. I wake up again. Pain. I put the cast back on.”

Interviewed two years later, it appears Csaba – who is in his early fifties - has suffered permanent damage. “The surgeon is telling me for some reason it doesn’t wanna heal. So I got days when my hand is OK. Right now, I don’t have pain.” Sometimes, says Anna, he’ll be holding a glass of water and it will suddenly fall from his fingers, three of which now frequently go numb.

He’s been advised the discomfort in his neck is connected to bone chipped off his C3 vertebra. When describing his assault, Csaba says he’s glad the police didn’t make him a vegetable. Since injuries involving C3 are associated with paralysis, they may have come appallingly close.

final installment: I’m a Different Person, a Better Guy