Canada: Bystanders ignore plight of burning homeless man

VANCOUVER -- St. Paul's emergency nurse Christine Wellstead has seen some pretty rough things on the job, but nothing has shaken her as much as the callous indifference she witnessed Monday night as bystanders ignored an unconscious homeless man wrapped in a burning comforter.

Wellstead was on her way home from work around 10:30 p.m. when she stopped at Starbucks at 19th and Cambie for a coffee. Smelling smoke, she walked outside to see what was burning, but all she could see was a woman sitting at an outside table, talking calmly on her phone as clouds of smoke rolled past her.

"She's on her cellphone, having her coffee and she's sitting amongst this acrid smoke," she said.

Looking further, Wellstead found a man slumped on a bench in a nearby alcove on the side street, wrapped in a comforter that was on fire.

"It was smouldering, and it was by his face," she said. "It was all orange, and there was smoke. I threw the blanket on the ground and tried to wake him up, but he didn't wake up."

She ran back into Starbucks for water to put out the fire, and that's when she got a real shock.

She said another woman customer standing at the counter told her: "Just leave him alone, he's a homeless person," Wellstead recalled. "I looked at her and I said, 'What are you talking about?'

"And she says, 'He's homeless, just forget it.' "

Appalled, Wellstead rushed back out with water to douse the fire and still couldn't wake the man, so she ran inside again and asked a barista to call for help.

"I said, 'You'd better call an ambulance, because I can't wake him up,' and the lady [customer] said, 'Don't call the hospital, they don't want him,' and I just looked at her, and I said, 'I work at the hospital and yeah, we want him.' "

Wellstead finally woke the man and got him sitting up as they waited for the ambulance. He told her he was prone to seizures and believed he had one while he was smoking, wrapped in his comforter against the night chill.

Wellstead said she didn't believe he suffered serious burns. The fire and ambulance crews who answered the call were great, she said, and treated him with respect as they took him away to St. Paul's Hospital.

The ambulance service confirmed a man was taken to St. Paul's after the incident. CanWest News could not obtain information on his condition Tuesday.

The well-dressed customer who made the callous remarks sat alone in her car at the curb, sipping her coffee and watching as the event unfolded.

Wellstead went home, but she was still upset Tuesday morning. "I can't get my head around it," she said. "I'm so upset. I was almost in tears.

"I know there are a lot of homeless people here and I know some of them can be annoying, but this was a human being.

"His blanket was on fire."

From now on, I'm going to bring up this story any time some Canadian lefty starts bloviating about how much more caring and compassionate they are than us awful Americans.

Juvenile arrogance of the sort that you describe needs to be instantly bitch-slapped into a quivering submissiveness, and I am honored if this article might help you in that regard. Full steam ahead and please remind any self-important America Haters that if Canada had had it's way, Saddam Hussein and his evil spawn Uday and Qusay would still be feeding live Iraqis through plastic shredder machines while their relatives were forced to watch and Saddam would still be providing substantial financial support for all terrorists and their families.. America has nothing to apologize for and nothing to feel guilty over. Please give this thread a prominent bookmark in your computer and redistribute it liberally.

Merry Christmas to you and yours :-)

Actually I'm not skeptical at all. Check out this other recent thread:

Teen Accused Of Paying Homeless Man $5 To Drink Cleaning Solution http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1541773/posts

It's also linked on the front page of drudge right now.

Here in Austin we have been having a problem recently with something called bum fights. People were paying the homeless to beat each other up and filming it (so they could sell the videos on the Internet). The police eventually got called in as it escalated to paying them to do really dangerous activities; if I remember right one homeless man was paid to walk across the outside rail of a major highway overpass.

Just because some homeless advocate groups go a little overboard in their descriptions of the plight of the homeless doesn't mean that that plight doesn't exist.

This is also a little off topic, but I'm starting to hear more "conservatives" recently talk as if we have no societal responsibility to reach out to individuals like this. I believe we do... I just believe it should be by private individuals, organizations, or the local government.

That is why this whole incident, and responses such as post #5, scare me so much.

Those "people" are a nusience. (sic) They're scum. I can fully understand why no one would care.

How are we to argue against the federal government stepping in if private citizens don't step up?

-paridel

How are we to argue against the federal government stepping in if private citizens don't step up?

I agree with your post 100%.....first of all, anyone who is skeptical of a story like this being true has simply not met a very wide range of people. People can be breathtakingly heartless when given a chance, in large measure because many have come to expect "the government " to do EVERYTHING for them.

This is also a little off topic, but I'm starting to hear more "conservatives" recently talk as if we have no societal responsibility to reach out to individuals like this. I believe we do... I just believe it should be by private individuals, organizations, or the local government.

Please don't be concerned...I'm not a "stay on topic" Fascist. It's one thing to be a supporter of the concept of a lean, waste-free government and it's quite another to turn your back on a human being WHO IS ON FIRE, right in front of you....

Let's not forget also that before the Welfare State, Churches did a fine job of helping those in need. We can thank the ACLU and groups like them not only for creating the homeless problem in large measure because they made it incredibly difficult to give these people the medical care that they need, but also for preventing us from having the very best solutions for dealing with it properly, what with all of the 'separation of Church and State' stuff. I would be delighted to give churches and other religious organizations mammoth tax incentives and direct aid while getting the Government out of direct care for the homeless....I'll bet we would see a precipitous reduction in homelessness as well as a dramatic overall improvement in the quality of life in numerous other areas of society.

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Bystanders ignore plight of burning homeless man

Maurice Bridge, CanWest News Service