They Were Yelling & Screaming (Part 3 of 4)
Ben asked the cops, ‘Why are you doing this? What's wrong with you?'
Part 1: Boom Truck Ben
Ben, the owner of the flatbed truck that became the Freedom Convoy’s main stage in Ottawa, had his phone number painted in large characters along the side of his crane. Strangers, many from south of the border, sent texts messages to that number. Most were "very encouraging. Keep it up, stay strong, that sort of thing."
But voicemail was another matter. "It was to the point I couldn't even keep up," he remembers. "My mailbox filled up with hate mail while I'm trying to delete messages." Eventually, an unknown person unlawfully hacked into his voicemail, locking him out. "They ended up replacing my voicemail greeting with their own, with a bunch of profanity." Which is why, after Ottawa, Ben got a new phone number.
Throughout those weeks, the police were a constant presence. "During the day, there's a cop or two, they're walking up and down, they're talking to people," he says. But after nightfall, they were more likely to travel in packs of five to ten, and "their demeanor wasn't friendly at all. It was very eerie some nights, it was an ugly feeling. Sometimes I would get out of my truck and just stand in the crowd."
By the third week, trucks were pulling out almost on a nightly basis. On one occasion, Ben heard a rumour that the cops were coming for his rig specifically. But nothing happened. After the police became violent further down Wellington, he started getting phone calls “from back home, saying 'They're coming.' At first I was like, No there's too many people, they wouldn't do that. Eventually I did end up going for a walk," he says, down near the Chateau Laurier hotel. A large contingent of police were advancing, but slowly. Someone said they were authorized to go only so far due to an obscure legal designation, "and I didn't know any better so I kind of believed it. But then Saturday, we found out different."
Sitting in his truck the next morning, Ben watched a line of riot police move inexorably toward him. The cops didn’t even try the door handles. If a driver was still inside, they smashed the windows. At that point, he says, "I opened the windows, I unlocked the doors, stepped outside the truck, and I just stood there." The police held wooden clubs crossways in front of them, with two hands. Protesters were being assaulted, physically thrust backwards.
"When they got to my truck, they pushed me right up against" the front of another big rig. "I was surrounded by cops, I had nowhere to go." As the officers aimed multiple blows at his chest and abdomen, Ben says "They were just yelling and screaming. Move! Move! I was asking them, ‘Where do you want me to go? Why are you doing this? What's wrong with you?'"
Ben insists he took no defensive action. "I remember I had one hand on the bumper" of the truck. "The cops probably had my other arm. I was just talking to them." A photograph taken at the time shows a gloved hand holding a large cannister close to Ben's face as an orange stream hits him point blank between the eyes.
"I didn't see that coming, not at all," he says. "I was totally blindsided." And blinded. He felt an instant burning sensation, followed by the realization that "I couldn't open my eyes for nothing."
Almost immediately afterward, "somebody kicked the feet out from under me" and Ben fell under the front of the truck. While he was on the ground, nearby protesters managed to yank him free. “It felt like I didn’t have any weight to me. They just grabbed me and pulled me right out as if I was a little kid.” Unexpectedly his brother, who'd arrived in Ottawa the previous day, was beside him. "He was the guy that grabbed me by the arm and took me back to my hotel room."
Along the way, they stopped at a tent next to the sidewalk,
There was a couple ladies in there, and they were helping people. Somebody else was in there with an injury of some sort. As we were walking past, they invited me in and wiped my face down with water and some napkins.
As I sat there, trying to recover a bit, I was telling them, 'They're coming, they're not far.'
And they're, 'Oh no, they're not gonna disturb a first aid tent."
I said, 'They're breaking windows without even checking.' I ended up leaving sooner than they would have preferred me to.
Ben doesn't remember the full journey back to the hotel. He smiles, "That day kind of threw me for a loop. We'd heard to use milk for rinsing my eyes. So my brother went and got milk, and I ended up just drenching a towel and laying it on my face just to try and cool down."
For the first three hours he couldn’t open his eyes “without actually grabbing my eyelids and prying them open with my fingers.” His tears ran constantly. Arriving at the hotel a while later, his wife spent the afternoon wiping his face. That evening, when she touched her own face, she was surprised at how much it burned: “She said her face burned from my tears.”
In a video interview recorded three weeks after those events, Ben laughs ruefully: “I had no idea how pepper spray actually can affect a person…It’s insane how well that stuff works. It’s a very good deterrent. I can see why they use it.”
When asked about bruises, he replies, "I didn't have any, actually. I had three layers on," including "a really thick pair of overalls. So that, along with my jacket, I was pretty well insulated."
final installment Tuesday
Reminds me of Lord of theFlies by William Golding where he brilliantly depicted the breakdown of civilized behaviour and Freud also talked about the loss of conscience in groups. Not one of those cops would have behaved that way alone.
Ben sure took one for all of us! Thank you Ben and thank you Donna for getting these stories recorded.
those feckin cops.