BEFORE THEIR paths so grimly intersected 13 years ago, their hearts brimmed with promise.
At 25, Tema Conter was a pretty and ambitious fashion buyer, just moved to Toronto from Halifax. Vince Savoia, 27, and Barrie Martin, 26, were Humber College graduates looking forward to long careers saving lives.
On Jan. 27, 1988, ambulance officers Martin and Savoia answered the call that neither will ever forget.
Entering an upscale Balliol St. apartment opposite a private tennis club shortly before supper, they found the nude young woman lying face down on her bed, bound hand-and-foot and gagged to muffle her screams.
She had been raped, beaten and murdered - stabbed 11 times. Fewer than two years in age separated the three during the 30 to 40 minutes they remained together in the victim's bedroom.
An eternity separates them now.
Conter was stabbed to death by 31-year-old Melvin Stanton, a convicted two-time rapist on a two-day unescorted pass from Warkworth penitentiary who was staying at a nearby halfway house.
Stanton accosted Conter in the corridor as she walked out the door on her way to work and forced her back into her 22nd-floor apartment just below the penthouse.
Martin is a 20-year veteran at Toronto Emergency Medical Services who has qualified as a critical-care paramedic. This relatively new tier of responsibility - ``at the pinnacle of pre-hospital care,'' Martin says - is based on knowledge of pharmacology and physiology and demands ``serious'' interventions, including timed intravenous infusions to be selected from more than 80 medications as well as advanced surgical procedures to stabilize breathing, pulse and heartbeat.
Savoia was plagued by feelings of helplessness and guilt after the call. He had a ``very difficult time'' going to work at Metro Ambulance (as it was called then) and came close to splitting with his fiancée.
He was so worried about her that he didn't want her to leave the house.
An eight-month course of therapy with the staff psychologist helped, he says, but after his 1989 wedding, his paranoia returned to the point that even his wife's wish to go to the corner store made him uncomfortable.
``I wanted to control her life. I didn't want her harmed in any way. I became very possessive,'' he says, his voice shaking even now.
``I don't think I had the potential to do that prior to the call.''
Savoia, who is president of the financial-services firm he started nine years ago, can never go back to his chosen first career.
He says he never could stop thinking about Tema Conter. He carried the image of her face in his heart and yearned ``to do something'' for the young woman he had come upon so brutally murdered.
Bella Hazzan, who had become Metro Ambulance's first staff psychologist in 1986, suggested planting a tree.
Savoia liked the idea but couldn't get it together until 1995, when he and his wife planted a mulberry bush in the front yard of their North York home.
``It took me a very long time to come to grips with this thing,'' Savoia says. ``I can't explain it. It took a while. . . .
``I had this need to reach out and contact her family. I just wanted to call and say I'm sorry for what happened, I'm sorry I couldn't do anything for her. But in this profession, you're taught not to. You stay away from the family.''
Savoia says he ``always wanted to do something for Tema,'' but nothing came of it until last spring, when an associate who was going on a business trip to Halifax offered to break the ice with the Conter family.
That paved the way for Savoia to contact the dead woman's older brother, Dr. Howard Conter, last August.
``As we discussed on the telephone earlier today, I am in the process of structuring an award,'' Savoia told the Halifax general practitioner in an Aug. 18 fax message.
``I attended your sister in 1988. The psychological and personal ramifications experienced by me as a result have been immense. In clinical terms, I suffered from critical-incident stress. . . . I was unable to do anything for her. This feeling of helplessness has been with me since that day. . . . Her death has been part of my life.''
Howard Conter's approval was what Savoia needed to germinate the seed he had carried for more than a decade. His Tema Conter Memorial Award was born.
The program began modestly last year at Humber College, with a $1,000 prize awarded in November for the best student essay on critical-incident stress.
The competition is going province-wide in the fall and Savoia hopes to open it to paramedic students across the country within five years.
The award not only honours the young woman who paid the price of her life 13 years ago, it also highlights the costs for paramedics.
Of Toronto's 800 paramedics, more than 87 per cent report some form of critical-incident stress after every emergency call.
A critical incident is described in the literature as any situation faced by emergency-services personnel that causes them to experience unusually strong emotional reactions that could interfere with their ability to function, either at the scene or later.
Savoia did function at the scene.
``I guess the best analogy I can use is that your uniform acts as a coat of armour,'' he recalls. ``You deal with the call. That's what you are trying to do. You don't let your emotions take over your ability to deal with the call.
``It really didn't impact us until later.''
Howard Conter - at 41 about the same age as Savoia - says that, as a physician, he can appreciate the shock of coming upon a gruesome scene.
``It is particularly difficult. I have no doubt it's a very, very traumatic thing. Ambulance officers can't prepare for it in the acute critical-care course they take.
``We're very happy this gentleman has taken the time to remember our sister in this way.''
In fact, Savoia says nobody talked about critical-incident stress when he went through the Humber College paramedic program in the early '80s.
It wasn't until Hazzan was hired in 1986 that ``we went to the occasional seminar. She brought it to the forefront for us.''
Driving home from Balliol St. on Jan. 27, 1988 - and ``crying uncontrollably'' during a sleepless night of sweats, shakes and flashbacks - Savoia at least knew enough to recognize the signs. He called Hazzan the next day.
But emotional preparation before a call is tricky.
``You can go into a scene knowing you will see unspeakable things,'' says Hazzan, now executive-director of a Toronto community health agency. ``But you don't really comprehend.
``How do you comprehend seeing body parts all over a highway? Or other things that people see? There can be an intellectual awareness but not necessarily a true emotional and cognitive awareness.
``The thing that ambulance officers don't like is the sense of helplessness and failure. And they have a very strong sense of right and wrong.
``So, when something happens that goes against their sense of fair play, where nothing good has come out of it and a patient's life has been lost, it does not sit well.
``Something good has to come out of that kind of tragedy.''
Perceiving that their efforts will have little or no control on the outcome is not the only cause of critical-incidence stress reactions, Hazzan adds.
Studies show that highly violent incidents or incidents in which the responder knows or identifies with the victim also can be major factors.
Making a personal link to the victim is what Savoia believes pushed him off the deep end.
``What threw me over the edge was, I looked at Tema and saw she reminded me of my fiancée,'' he says.
``It was almost as if there was a twinship there. The physical resemblance was very remarkable. It was her hair. They both had the same sort of shoulder-length hair. Her size and build were also about the same.
``In one split-second, you just make that connection.''
He still makes that connection, Savoia adds with a nervous laugh.
By 1988, he had attended several homicides as gruesome as Conter's, he says, ``but you are not trained on how to deal with that one patient who reminds you of a family member.''
For Martin, shock was ``probably the biggest issue that day.
``What was different about this was, there seemed to be a sense of - I am trying to put a word to this - surreal. When we walked in, we knew what we were going to be exposed to in terms of a deceased person. But we didn't prepare ourselves for the visual side of it.
``When dealing with the human body in situations of violence, there is a visual aspect you'll always remember. I hadn't seen anything like that up to that point.''
Martin remained in the profession, but the Conter call was a critical incident for him, too.
``That was one of the serious calls over my career,'' he says. ``It was a turning point. It was something new. It affected me, but just the outcome was different.''
Not everyone exposed to a critical incident will experience critical-incident stress, notes Hazzan, explaining that each person comes into a situation with unique issues and triggers.
``You can have 10 individuals go to the same event and they all can have very different responses, all of which are normal.''
Detective-Sergeant Victor Matanovic of the homicide squad arrived in Tema Conter's bedroom while Savoia and Martin were still on the scene.
Then 40, Matanovic had been called by the uniformed police officers whom the building superintendent let in after the victim failed to report for work.
``You can't go in there and get all emotional because then you are not doing any good as an investigator,'' the now-retired detective says.
``Looking at the crime scene in the case of a dead person, unfortunately, your approach is that you look at her as a piece of evidence now. You can't approach it emotionally or you cannot be doing that type of work.''
Learning to dissociate is part of the training for emergency-services workers. In order to function at the scene, they must be able to keep their emotions under control.
That training, however, also can be be a liability, says Toronto Emergency Medical Services staff psychologist Gerald Goldberg, who took over from Hazzan in 1991.
``Dissociating while you are on the job is all very well and good,'' Goldberg says, ``but when you finish it, sometimes you don't want to admit you are upset.
``And then you put your head on the pillow, and what you've been dissociating comes back to haunt you.
``How do you deal with that? Some people don't deal with it very well, and then their stress becomes a chronic problem.''
Goldberg points to research showing that, when questioned directly after a call, almost all emergency workers will say they are fine. But asked 24 hours later - when they can respond anonymously - more than 87 per cent of these workers admit to experiencing some symptoms of critical-incident stress.
In fact, the majority of stress reactions are delayed, occurring hours, days or even months after an incident.
Emergency workers learning to swallow their emotions is only part of the reason for this lag, says Goldberg. The other part is that they have a macho image of themselves that interferes with getting them to admit they have a problem, even to themselves.
``It's not a disease to be shaken up if you see a mother killing a child.
``It's a sign you are a human being. We just don't have the coping skills to deal with that kind of stuff.''
Critical-incident stress is a normal reaction to abnormal situations, Goldberg continues.
It becomes abnormal only if it's not handled properly.
Toronto Emergency Medical Services now has a program that includes regular monitoring, one-on-one and group treatment and a volunteer SWAT team of peer counselors trained by Goldberg.
Martin, who is on the selection committee for Savoia's award and a member of the board of the newly formed Tema Conter Memorial Trust, says he has learned to cope with violent situations.
``Every time you do get exposed to something like that, there's a growth that occurs in the way you deal with it. It's an ability to know what your limitations are, know what you're feeling, know how you are going to react.
``Deep down inside, you realize you are human and you do have emotions.''
Savoia doesn't know if he'll ever be able to call himself healed.
``I don't think this sort of a call ever leaves you,'' he says. ``I think it will be with me as long as I live, although it's become a lot easier to talk about.
``That entails always admitting to yourself you're not the super-Teflon superhuman who can handle any call. . . .
``It changed my character. It changed the way I looked at life and how fragile it actually is. . . .
``I don't think society really understands what the job of the paramedic is.''
Conter's murder set off years of controversy over Canada's parole system.
The December, 1988, inquest produced 38 recommendations to improve case management, parole procedures and the operation of halfway houses. A special audit of case management at Warkworth was conducted in March, 1989.
After a hue and cry from the community, the privately run Yonge St. halfway house from which Stanton escaped was closed about a year after the murder, and a decision was made in December, 1993, not to reopen it.
But federal parole legislation, which came into force in November, 1992, does not allow police to arrest or detain a person prowling the streets in violation of parole or pass conditions, one of the key recommendations of the Conter inquest.
As for Conter's killer, Matanovic travelled to Wawa on Feb. 1, 1988, to bring the fugitive, who had been stopped for driving under the speed limit, back to Toronto
Stanton pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in June, 1988.
He was one of the first killers to admit his guilt since capital punishment was abolished in 1975, says Matanovic, explaining that, without the death penalty, most defendants figure they have nothing to lose by pleading not guilty opting for a trial.
Stanton is currently serving his life sentence in Quebec.
He is eligible for his next unescorted pass on Jan. 30, 2010, and for full parole on Jan. 30, 2013.
Reproduced courtesy The Toronto Star Syndicate.
Murder Scene/Murder Seen
Ex-Paramedic still suffers trauma from what he experienced 13 year ago in slain woman's bedroom
Sarah Jane Growe STAFF Reporter - The Toronto Star
May 2001
Copyright 2010 Tema Conter Memorial Trust | Charity Registration Number 88361 4919 RR0001
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