Constable Ian Jordan.Victoria Police Department
Constable Ian Jordan was working a night shift when a burglar alarm sounded at a stereo shop in downtown Victoria.
The officer jumped into a squad car alone and sped toward the break-in only to be T-boned at the first intersection by another patrol car answering the same call.
The 35-year-old officer suffered a traumatic brain injury when his head struck the car’s interior roll bar. He was knocked unconscious and rendered comatose at 2:48 a.m. on Sept. 22, 1987, a moment when Ronald Reagan was completing his second term as U.S. president and Brian Mulroney his first as prime minister; Nelson Mandela remained jailed and the Berlin Wall still stood; there was not yet e-mail, Facebook, or even a World Wide Web. Mr. Jordan never regained consciousness and so missed all those developments before his death in hospital on April 11. He was 66.
He spent more than 30 years – 11,160 days, to be precise – in a vegetative state. His family visited daily. It became a ritual for each new police chief to make a pilgrimage to Mr. Jordan’s bedside. Fellow officers stopped by regularly even as the passing years brought citations, promotions and, eventually, retirement. A plaque was placed in his hospital room to mark his own retirement as a constable after 22 years and five months with the department.
Over the years, Mr. Jordan missed the landmarks of ordinary life. A son, who was 16 months old on the night of the accident, graduated in turn from high school, university and, finally, law school. A wife, the former Hilary Lemon, his high-school sweetheart, marked wedding anniversaries in solitude. Holidays were spent in hospital.
“We tried to include him as best we could,” she said.
Ian Douglas Jordan was born in Arcola, a farming town in southeast Saskatchewan, on March 5, 1952, to the former Marion Doris McLeod and Henry Lucius (Harry) Jordan, an RCMP officer who moved his family of four sons to postings in Carlyle, Kamsack and Regina, Sask.; Markham, Ont.; Ottawa, and Vancouver.
A peripatetic childhood ended when the family settled in Victoria. As a teenager, Mr. Jordan got a summer job working on an RCMP boat and later got a civilian job handling explosives for the Canadian Forces at the Rocky Point Ammunition Depot, west of the city. He enrolled in political science at the University of Victoria, completing his degree in two years as a mature student. He then earned a law degree at the university, graduating in 1983.
He was sworn into the Victoria Police Department on Oct. 22, 1984, joining Canada’s oldest police force west of the Great Lakes. The young officer, who planned on a future career in foreign service, kept scrapbooks of his cases, including some plainclothes assignments during which he adopted an atypically unkempt appearance.
Earlier on what would be his final shift, Mr. Jordan suffered a knee injury in a scuffle when pushed down stairs at a nightclub. He was completing paperwork and preparing to call it an early night when the alarm sounded. He knew his friend Constable Ole Jorgensen, with whom he had coffee earlier in the evening, would be responding with a police dog, so he, too, decided to answer the call. He left the police station on Fisgard Street in Chinatown and had driven only 100 metres eastbound from the underground garage before a southbound car driven by Mr. Jorgensen slammed into him at the intersection of Douglas Street.
“We were both going about 70 kilometres an hour,” recalled Mr. Jorgensen, who retired from the force in 2005 as a sergeant. “I don’t think he expected me there, and I never expected him.”
Mr. Jorgensen slammed on the brakes, suffering a fracture to his outstretched right leg when the vehicles collided. He also had soft-tissue injuries from straining against the shoulder harness and missed six months of work. His police dog, Radar, a four-year-old male German shepherd, was uninjured. Mr. Jordan was left a paraplegic in critical condition.
“I got that infamous knock on the door at 3 a.m.,” Hilary Jordan said. She remembers one of the officers holding a flashlight below his chin so she could see his familiar face in the darkness. “I knew right away. I asked, ‘Is he dead?’ They said no, but you’d better come to the hospital. It was a long ride.”
Her husband spent six weeks in intensive care. He needed a breathing tube and received nourishment through a feeding tube. After six months, she was told by doctors there would be no improvement to his condition.
“That’s when the grieving started,” she said.
Over time, the breathing tube was removed and he seemed to undergo wake and sleep cycles with opened eyes. Family members believed he responded to voices and such other stimuli as a squeeze of the hand. Mr. Jordan received care at Victoria General Hospital and Gorge Road Hospital before being moved to Glengarry Hospital, an extended-care facility that would be his final address.
For years, a police scanner squawked in his room, a tribute from fellow officers to a well-regarded comrade.
Mr. Jordan leaves Hilary Jordan, of Victoria, his wife of 45 years, and a son, Mark Jordan, of Edmonton, a criminal-defence lawyer. He also leaves an older brother, Patrick Jordan, of Vancouver.
Mr. Jordan’s name will now be added to the B.C. Law Enforcement Memorial on the grounds of the B.C. Legislature.
In Victoria, the flag at City Hall was lowered to half-mast on news of the death. On Thursday afternoon at Christ Church Cathedral, the police will hold a formal funeral with military-style honours for the fallen officer, a final public ritual to mark a life, as well as a death, interrupted for more than three decades.