Downtown attack victim praises bystanders

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This article was published 30/01/2024 (598 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

After being attacked and robbed in downtown Brandon on Friday afternoon, Dwyane Dyck says he met more good people than bad people that day.

“There was just people there and they were willing to help [and] pretty concerned about what’s going on,” Dyck told the Sun about the bystanders and first responders who helped him after he was attacked.

“They’re all strangers, I didn’t know any of them … I ran into a lot more good people than people doing bad things.”

Dyck was hit in the head with a baton around 2 p.m. after two men approached him in an alley in the 300 block of Louise Avenue between 15th and 16th streets.

He said he was on his way to a coffee shop to do some writing when two men approached him. They were yelling at him, Dyck said, though he couldn’t hear because he had been wearing headphones. The men asked him for money and after he handed them some cash, one of the men hit him on the head with a baton.

Dyck, who is the executive director of Westman Youth for Christ, was back in the office on Monday, but is recovering from the head wound. He said that he received eight stitches to his head and some bruising to his arm.

“My head has been OK, it’s still bleeding a bit — head wounds bleed a lot, so I lost a lot of blood,” Dyck said.

Bystanders on the scene were quick to offer help.

After he was hit on the head, a man asked him if he was all right and tried to run after the attackers, Dyck said.

Then another man in a truck pulled over and let Dyck sit in his truck while he helped him call 911.

A woman also stopped at the scene to offer her help.

Dyck said he thinks he might have recognized one of the men who attacked him as someone who had been in the Youth for Christ office looking for housing support.

Dyck said some of the people around him, like colleagues and family, are feeling afraid after the attack, but he plans to continue to walk downtown.

“I’m still walking, I’m not giving up that kind of space just because somebody wants to do something bad,” he said. “I’m not going to get in my car and drive.”

While he said he hopes the police catch the two men, and that they own up to their decisions that Friday afternoon, what Dyck said he really wants to do is have a conversation with his attackers.

“I’d really like to sit down and have the conversation with them and find some way — they don’t have to take it — but there’s no way to have a path to redemption, to any kind of healing, if you can’t walk through forgiveness,” Dyck said. “And that starts with the conversation.”

Dyck’s approach is informed by his 30 years of experience at Youth for Christ, a charity that helps young people move through difficult life situations. Building relationships with people in the community, he said, helps to create a sense of accountability.

“I’m convinced that people who have around them a healthy community, they’re way less likely to be doing stuff like this. It just gets hard to make a bad choice when everyone around you cares about you and they’re making good choices.”

Dyck said for now he’s taking it relatively easy to let his brain heal.

“I just think that’s what people need,” he said. “They need people around them, they have a community around them that cares or them, that cares about them, and they have to participate.”

Brandon Police Service confirmed that no arrests have been made and that the file has been transferred to the major crimes section for further investigation.

On the weekend, BPS posted a news release stating they were looking for two men in connection with the attack — an Indigenous man about six-foot-one in his mid-20s wearing a red hoodie and red sweatpants, and another man, described as Indigenous, five-foot-10, wearing a black ball cap and a black puffy jacket, with a tattoo under his right eye.

» gmortfield@brandonsun.com

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