KINGSTON, ONT.—Tayyab Jafar walks through a gruel of slush coating the wide pier behind a King St. public works building. He stops and points to the place he died.“Right about here,” says the fourth-year Queen’s University student from Oakville.The spot is at the pier’s edge. Near a warning in long faded letters stencilled across the ground: “No Diving.”He is silent for a moment. Wintry drizzle falls. Lake Ontario’s steel-grey waters slap below. The sky’s wet gloom frames Jafar’s slender figure.The 22-year-old, shrugging, hands in pockets, says: “That happened.”But what happened was far from ordinary. Jafar’s story is one of resurrection; how tenacious medical teams brought a frozen man back to life.A year ago, cloaked in the darkness of a frigid January morning, this is where Jafar chose to end his life. Two days before his 21st birthday, Jafar was found at early light — shoes off, coat over his face, an empty prescription sedative bottle nearby — without vital signs.“Vital signs absent means dead,” says Julie Socha, one of four Frontenac County paramedics who rushed to the scene. Engaging and intelligent, Jafar had been studying physics courses at Queen’s in hopes of getting into engineering. That plan began to unravel just weeks before he quietly left the off-campus house he rented with friends. He’d placed a goodbye note on his desk and, a stickler for details, banking instructions so his housemates wouldn’t miss a bill payment.Then he walked 10 minutes to the pier.On that sub-zero morning, Jafar lay in a snow bank. His body was starting to freeze. His core temperature would later be recorded at 20.8 C — about 16 degrees below normal. Hypothermia occurs when a person’s core temperature dips below 35 C, a condition often caused by exposure to cold weather or water immersion.The death appeared to be an intent ...
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