The Toronto Star
SASKATOON, Canada — He was one of the most recognizable residents in Saskatoon and some people consider the Prairie city a little different now that he’s gone.
Alvin Cote wasn’t a well-known politician, businessman or hockey player, but a ragged, homeless alcoholic whose tough talk would easily melt into a hearty chuckle and a big smile short on teeth.
He spent that past couple of decades living in Saskatoon. He could be seen curled up on floor of a bank foyer, sleeping on park benches or reading worn copies of National Geographic in the drunk tank.
He died April 19, a few days shy of his 60th birthday.
Saskatoon police officers are still talking about his death, even though they considered it an inevitable fate. It’s believed Cote had been arrested more times for public drunkenness than anyone else in the city’s history. Some officers put the tally at close to 1,000.
Although his obituary does not list an official cause of death, police say Cote was in hospital with pneumonia when he died.
Downtown beat officer Const. Derek Chesney was surprised and saddened when he heard the news. He saw the man almost every day over the past five years.
“It’s not often that you can arrest somebody on multiple occasions and end up being friends with them. But such was the case with Alvin,” Chesney recently wrote on his official police blog, Cops and Bloggers.
The officer confesses he cried after writing the online tribute.
“You realize that people can fall through the cracks,” says Chesney. “And just as much as a good person can have a bad day, things can happen to people in their lives where they end up going on a path that perhaps they didn’t choose.”
Cote was from the Cote First Nation in the Kamsack area, east of Saskatoon, near the Manitoba boundary. He was sent as a child to a residential school on a neighbouring reserve and suffered years of abuse, says Chesney.
Cote has a sister in Saskatoon and she tried to look after Cote for a while, says Chesney. But he wouldn’t stop drinking.
Chesney remembers meeting Cote for the first time in the winter of 2009 outside the old train station downtown.
Chesney had just earned his badge and saw the man with a scraggly beard tapping and flexing his arms, yelling his catchphrase: “I’m a fighter.”
Chesney calmed him down by asking, “I heard you were a lover, not a fighter.”
“Well, I’m that too,” Cote laughed.
Chesney and his partner then put Cote in their cruiser and, as they were heading back to the police station, Cote knocked on the dividing window with $5 in his hand. He said he was hungry. Chesney ran into a McDonald’s and got him two double cheeseburgers. Cote happily devoured his meal during the rest of the ride.
Police aren’t the only ones mourning Cote. Chesney’s blog has received hundreds of clicks and comments from people who had seen Cote on the streets, even though they never knew his name.
A McDonald’s manager wrote about how she will miss waking Cote up outside the restaurant in the mornings and asking him to move along. Another woman said she’ll miss buying him lunch. One man talked about how he once saw Cote sleeping inside a bank foyer. He slipped some money under the pile of clothes the man was using as a pillow.
“Sounds like this guy may have been an angel in disguise?” wrote a woman named Amy. “He seems to have brought out the best in humanity.”
Chesney hopes the bench in the police lobby that Cote sat on for countless hours will be decorated with a plaque in his name and moved into the new police station that’s under construction.
That way Cote will always be there.
“He was a fighter. He was a survivor. And he’ll be remembered.”
Copyright 2013 Toronto Star Newspapers Limited