VANCOUVER — Police were justified in using a Taser stun gun on a Polish immigrant in 2007 because the man was agitated, failed to obey police commands and caused police to fear for their safety, an RCMP officer told the Braidwood inquiry Monday.

RCMP Const. Gerry Rundel, who had been an RCMP officer for only two years when the man was Tasered at Vancouver International Airport said the fact that Robert Dziekanski spoke no English was not a factor in his failure to obey police commands.

He recalled that seconds after police arrived on the scene — at the exit to the international arrivals area at the airport — Dziekanski tossed a chair against a glass wall and then bent down and motioned toward his luggage.

Rundel recalled RCMP Corp. Benjamin (Monty) Robinson told Dziekanski “No,” in an authoritative voice, holding out the palm of his hand to signal to the Polish man that he could not go into his luggage.

“Mr. Dziekanski clearly understood the command,” the witness told the inquiry, which is probing Dziekanski’s death and the use of Tasers in B.C.

Dziekanski then “disobeyed Cpl. Robinson by flipping up his hands and leaving,” Rundel said.

“My interpretation of that was, ‘To hell with you guys — I’m out of here,’” he said.

“I didn’t see it myself, but he grabbed a metal object, later determined to be a stapler. He had a firm grasp of it.”

Rundel said Dziekanski assumed a combative pose, swinging the stapler in front of his body and balling his hands into fists at chest-level, then moved his left foot forward as if preparing to fight.

The inquiry was told earlier that once the four officers surrounded him, Dziekanski’s final words, spoken in Polish, were: “Leave me alone! Are you out of your mind? Why?”

That’s when Const. Kwesi Millington deployed the Taser, Rundel said.

Dziekanski yelled, indicating he was feeling the Taser shock but did not fall, the witness recalled.

“Hit him again,” Robinson told Millington, meaning deploy the stun gun again, Rundel said.

After the second shock, Dziekanski dropped the stapler and fell to the ground.

Rundel said he thought Dziekanski was Tasered twice, but the inquiry has heard the Taser was deployed five times.

Rundel and Const. Bill Bentley then moved in to handcuff Dziekanski. They had a prolonged struggle handcuffing his hands behind his back and Rundel had to put his weight on Dziekanski’s back and hold down the man’s legs down.

“Once Mr. Dziekanski was handcuffed there was still a kicking motion for five or 10 seconds,” before he stopped resisting, Rundel said. Minutes later, he said, Dziekanski was snoring, indicating he was unconscious.

Dziekanski died at the scene.

When a video showing his final moments was shown in the courtroom Monday, Dziekanski’s mother began crying. She left court sobbing.

Patrick McGowan, a lawyer for inquiry commissioner Thomas Braidwood, asked Rundel if he interpreted Dziekanski’s movements on the ground and the noises he was making as evidence of resistance.

“Yes,” Rundel replied.

“Did you consider it might have something to do with him being Tasered again?” “No,” Rundel replied.

Dziekanski, 40, had no drugs or alcohol in his system that night. He had left Poland 24 hours earlier and had spent about 10 hours in the airport, unable to find his mother who had come to meet him.

He had never been on a plane before and came to Canada to live with his mother, who had left the airport to return home to Kamloops after being told by officials that her son could not be located.

Several people called 911 after the exhausted man became agitated and began acting bizarrely.

Rundel recalled he and his three colleagues were having lunch together at the airport RCMP detachment when the dispatcher called out that there was an intoxicated non-white male throwing around luggage at the airport. (He turned out to be neither intoxicated nor non-white.)

The officers got into separate police cars and drove the one-minute distance to the airport, arriving seconds apart. On the way, the dispatcher said “the man now is throwing chairs against a glass window.”

Rundel recalled that when he got to the international arrivals area, Dziekanski was looking very unkempt and his hair was matted, looking like he had been sweating.

“He had a wide-eyed glaze,” he recalled, adding he thought Dziekanski was intoxicated, on drugs or in some other kind of distress.

He said a woman at the airport had said the man did not speak English, he did not pass that on to his colleagues. He said things just happened so fast.

He said Bentley greeted Dziekanski with a friendly, “Hi, how you doing?” But seconds later Dziekanski had been Tasered and was writhing on the floor.

The officer continues his testimony today. The three other RCMP officers at the scene will follow Rundel.

Transcripts of each day’s testimony are posted online at: www.braidwoodinquiry.ca

nhall@vancouversun.com