A red car rolled by as plumber Eddie Dick stood next to his van, a bucket of tools in each hand, waiting his turn to cross the street in north-central Edmonton.
He never got a chance to look left before crossing. The impact threw him nearly 30 feet, and the driver kept going, leaving him sprawled in the road.
When he opened his eyes, he was lying on his back, blood streaming from a gash over his eye. He couldn’t stand. Using his hands, he pushed himself backwards on the pavement up against a parked car.
“Wow, I just got smoked by a car,” he remembered thinking. “I think I’m OK. I think I’ll walk out of this.”
Dick was wrong. He suffered life-changing injuries.
What happened to Eddie Dick on Sept. 6, 2025, was over in seconds. But 10 months later, he is still waiting for the Edmonton Police Service, or EPS, to complete its investigation and provide a report.
A Tyee investigation found the EPS has no deadline for producing a report on a hit and run, and it has so far declined to explain the delay to Dick or to his lawyer.
For Dick, it means no closure, because the driver who ran him down has still not been identified. And Daniel Bromley, Dick’s lawyer, said that if no report is produced, it would probably make it difficult to get compensation from the provincial Motor Vehicle Accident Claims program. That program allows victims to sue and receive payment for their injuries when an uninsured or an unknown driver is at fault.
In an interview at his north Edmonton home, Dick said doctors at the University of Alberta Hospital found the damage went far beyond the gash over his eye.
Every structural ligament in his right foot was torn, he said, and he suffered nerve damage. He now walks with the aid of a cane.
Specialists have since diagnosed him with chronic regional pain syndrome, a condition that can occur after injury or surgery to a limb. He said his doctors told him that even with treatment, improvement is not guaranteed.
The head impact left him with a traumatic brain injury, he said. He now experiences vertigo and has lost his sense of smell. He is on workers’ compensation, and he said his injuries are effectively career ending as a plumber and gas fitter, leaving him unsure what, if any, work he will be able to do again.
Questions about police efforts
Dick has many questions about how the police conducted their investigation, particularly about its thoroughness.
After he was hit, firefighters and paramedics arrived as his plumbing client, a former nurse, attended to the wound on his head. Dick said he remembers police being there, but he never spoke with an officer.
Hours later, in the hospital trauma room, he said two officers approached him.
“They walked in and right off the hop, their first words to me were ‘Well, obviously you’re not in any shape to give us a statement right now.’”
They left him a blank police report to fill out later, tucked it into the bag with his bloodied clothing.
They were looking, they said, for a red car with a female driver.
Dick said he tried to correct them on the spot. He told them the red car had been heading north; the vehicle that hit him had been going south.
Photo supplied.
Over the following weeks, Dick corrected the record at least three more times — once in his written statement, and twice more by email to Jason Bouwmeester, the investigating officer.
In Bouwmeester’s only email to Dick, the officer wrote that he had been door knocking houses along the street in an attempt to find security video footage of the accident, and that he was waiting on an inspector to approve a media release. The release, issued two days later, still described the wrong car.
Dick said he never heard from Bouwmeester again, nor was he contacted by the EPS’s victims’ services. He was never asked to give a formal statement, other than the written victim statement he provided after the accident.
“I thought we would have gotten at least a phone call or a knock saying, ‘Hey, are you guys OK?’ [because] like it was a hit and run, and I was admitted to trauma,” he said.
“I think that should have check-marked a few boxes.”
Dick also pointed out that police did not collect the clothes he was wearing when he was hit. He wonders how police could link the vehicle that hit him without any physical evidence.
EPS reveals it suspended its investigation
Dick’s lawyer said he has handled many collision claim cases and those that involved a criminal investigation were rare, probably about one to two per cent. So he can’t say if the investigation conducted by police in Dick’s case is unusual.
But he could point to a clear contrast.
“I have had hit and runs before where the police just decided pretty early on they’re never finding the guy, and so they just provided the report pretty quickly,” Bromley said. “It did not take eight or so months to get the information from them.”
Bromley confirmed that police have still not provided the report.
The Tyee asked the EPS for an interview with Bouwmeester, the investigating officer, to determine why no report had been provided to Dick or his lawyer more than 10 months after the accident.
Instead, the EPS issued a statement through a spokesperson that did not address that key question.
“Unfortunately, police have been unable to obtain further information that could advance the file, and investigators have had to suspend the investigation pending the receipt of additional information.”
The Tyee followed up, asking why Dick had not been informed that the investigation had been suspended. A day later, an EPS spokesperson replied, saying they are looking into our inquiry. The spokesperson did not send a response by publication time.
Dick was angry when The Tyee informed him that police had suspended the investigation into his case.
“They didn’t even have the basic respect to inform me that anything was suspended,” he said.
“The biggest piss off is obviously my life wasn’t worth 15 minutes’ worth of paperwork. So, whose life is, and who gets to decide that?” he said.
“It makes me wonder, how many other people have they done this to?”
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