Versional Incompatibility

If there are two individuals involved in a dispute there are always two versions of what caused the dispute and how it accelerated and the manner in which it proceeded, let alone its conclusion. Even when people are in accord when they've been twinned in an occurrence that hasn't been unpleasant, their recall of events will be nuanced variously; that which one person remembers clearly will be recalled quite differently by the other person.

It is human nature to observe and to commit to memory and to recall in an idiosyncratic manner.

And of course it is also human nature to viscerally recall what reflects well upon yourself and badly upon your adversary. So there is little surprise in learning, through news reports, of two quite different versions of events in the incident that took place at the Ottawa airport on May 11, 2009 when a verbal altercation deteriorated into a physical confrontation between an Ottawa police officer, Shyldon Safruk and a cabbie, Sami Aldoboni.

Immediately post-event sympathy went with Mr. Aldoboni, who had the support of his peers present at the time and witness to the event, because of the manner in which the proceedings had been reported. And because Mr. Aldoboni had sustained an injury which caused him to suffer not only pain, but a lapse in his ability to carry on with his profession until his wound healed. And also because Mr. Aldoboni's story clearly identified Mr. Safruk as an aggressor.

However, the trial that resulted from the event revealed some very interesting details that were not previously known. There was a video that clearly demonstrated Mr. Aldoboni to have been as much an aggressor as Mr. Safruk. There was also a witness, a colleague of Mr. Aldoboni's who testified that Mr. Aldoboni had initiated physical contact. And there was Mr. Aldoboni's own testimony before Justice Radley-Walters which demonstrated his propensity to twisting the truth.

"This clear attempt to mislead the court impacts negatively on Mr. Aldoboni's credibility and reliability", Ontario Court Justice Grant Radley-Walters stated when Mr. Aldoboni was caught in an outright falsification of the truth. He had denied responding to an insulting gesture that Mr. Safruk offered when he had almost been run off the road by Mr. Aldoboni's cab on the Airport Parkway.

The off-duty policeman, Constable Shyldon Safruk, was, in fact, acting in self-defence when he responded to a "sweeping" punch levelled against him by Mr. Aldoboni. It was the action of committing to that "sweeping punch" that led Mr. Aldoboni to fall to the ground, injuring his wrist, arm and fingers; a natural correlation to a fall of the kind Mr. Aldoboni sustained.

The injuries he had attributed to Mr. Safruk's physical violence were in fact, self-inflicted.

So it is just as well that Justice Radley-Walters found Constable Safruk not guilty. All the more so since he stated he found the driver's claims of brutality by the off-duty policeman to be laced with lies, well contradicted by surveillance video. Although the court of public opinion was firmly on Mr. Aldoboni's side immediately post-incident, it appears now that justice has been done.