The jury at a coroner’s inquest in La Ronge has concluded that Walter Clinton McKenzie’s death was an accident.
After deliberating for an hour and a half, the six jurors told coroner Robert Kennedy that in their opinion, no one intentionally caused the blunt force trauma that led to McKenzie’s death.
The 32-year-old man from Brabant Lake died in Saskatoon’s Royal University Hospital just before 3 a.m. on September 8, 2010, after being found unconscious in his La Ronge police cell.
Pathologist Shaun Ladham testified earlier today that McKenzie died from a brain hemorrhage caused by blunt force trauma — likely falling on his face — some time before he walked into the La Ronge emergency room on September 6, 2010.
McKenzie told the ER nurses that he had fallen and cut his eye on a stick.
Asked about the effect of McKenzie’s level of intoxication — described in court as five to seven times the legal limit — on a nurse or doctor’s ability to diagnose the brain injury, Ladham said that “it obliterates it.”
A patient with an acute subdural hemorrhage will have tired, droopy eyes, difficulty with balance or walking, confusion, sleepiness, vomiting, and slurred speech, just like someone who is heavily intoxicated.