Yellowknife (Mar 28/03) - Police picked up Archie Tsetta, a chronic alcoholic, in a downtown alley on a warm summer day last June. They booked him into the drunk tank where he fell unconscious. He never recovered and died a month later.

Chief Coroner Percy Kinney held a three-day inquest into the death of Tsetta this week. A six-person jury will decide how, when and why Tsetta died. But they are also grappling with more challenging questions: how to prevent similar deaths and manage Yellowknife's horrendous alcohol problem.

Tsetta, 35, drank everything from wine to Lysol. He was epileptic and often had seizures. Witnesses at the inquest from police officers to hospital emergency staff knew him well, and spoke fondly of him. He was a regular.

Police booked Tsetta into cells on a regular -- sometimes daily -- basis. When he was having a seizure, they called an ambulance.

Sometimes he faked these seizures because he preferred staying in the hospital to staying in jail, said ambulance attendant Mike Dunsmore.

In the last three years of his life, Tsetta rode in an ambulance more than 100 times. He was given so many X-rays at the hospital that staff in the radiation department became concerned.

Due to years of hardcore drinking, the part of Tsetta's brain that controls balance was shrunken and scarred. This left him vulnerable to falling. It was not unusual for Tsetta to have an injury on his head, testified several witnesses.

In fact Tsetta's health had deteriorated to such an extent that Const. Tammy Gramiak did not handcuff him when she arrested him on June 19. He was fragile, she testified, and walked with difficulty even when sober.

Gramiak brought him back to the detachment and put him in the "drunk tank" which is a cell with no beds. The lack of beds prevents inmates from standing on something and injuring themselves, she said. There is a toilet, sink and drain in the room. The floor is concrete.

Cameras record the happenings in the cells and a prison guard checks on the inmates every 10 minutes.

The next morning, guard Ruby Piercey noticed Archie was lying very still. This was unusual, she said, Archie was usually calling for coffee in the morning.

When she asked another prisoner to roll him over, they noticed bloody mucus coming from his mouth. She hit the panic button.

Tsetta was rushed to the hospital where Dr. Shireen Mansouri decided to medevac him to Edmonton. Although she suspected the problem was neurological, she could not order a CAT scan in Yellowknife because the hospital had no radiologist or technician working.

Doctors in Edmonton discovered Tsetta suffered from a head injury that caused a collection of blood to arise in his skull and push on the brain. They drained the blood, but it didn't help.

Finally, almost a month later, his family made the decision to bring him home. He stopped breathing the day after he returned.

Dr. Graeme Dowling, a forensic pathologist and the chief medical examiner of Alberta, reviewed Tsetta's medical records and testified he died from complications arising from a head injury. This means he fell or was struck on the left side of his head.

"There is no evidence he was struck by any individual," said Dowling. "It seemed likely he suffered an injury as a result of a fall."

Dowling said Tsetta may have fallen because of a seizure, because he was drunk, or because the damaged part of his brain left him unstable.

Cameras that record the prison cells show Tsetta tried to sit up six times that night. He fell each time, although Dowling testified a fall from a sitting position probably couldn't produce this type of injury.

Usually, said Dowling, those who suffer from bleeding in the brain fall unconscious within 18 hours of receiving an injury. Tsetta was in police custody for 12 hours, so his injury may have occurred before going to jail.

Witnesses at the inquest spoke fondly of the 35-year-old man, calling him by his first name.

At one point, David Harder, director of programs at the Salvation Army, fought back tears.

"The saddest thing for me is that Archie Tsetta had a story," said Harder. "We saw him in this community as a drunk. "He drank everything from wine to Lysol. We saw him as that person. There was a lot more to him than that. He had a life, a story."

Tsetta wasn't born an alcoholic, continued Harder, but he found alcohol helped him cope with his problems. "It turned into an addiction, it got out of control and he died."

The last words before closing summations went to Joanne Tsetta.

She described her brother as a gentle person with many friends.

"I don't want anybody to remember Archie as a street person," she said. "He had a home, he had a family to go to."

"Archie was somebody," she said. "I miss him dearly."