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Gordon Hansen, in custody on fraud charges, was in the same compartment as Joseph — each handcuffed and shackled — when the other inmate appeared to pass out after snorting something.

“We go around a corner and he can’t brace himself, so he slides off the seat onto me and then falls onto the floor,” Hansen said in a phone interview from Fraser Regional Correctional Centre.

“I took his leg up, slapping him, trying to get him up, but he’s snoring, so I know he is alive.”

Joseph later stopped snoring and his hand was blue. Hansen checked his breathing. He thought the officers in the cab would see Joseph on cameras they monitor.

But the van passed through Quesnel and continued on to Williams Lake without anyone checking on Joseph.

Hansen thinks the van was about 50 kilometres south of Williams Lake when it finally stopped.

“When they got me out, there was already an RCMP (officer) there, lights flashing,” he said.

Hansen said paramedics did not arrive for a long time — he thinks 40 minutes to an hour. Joseph was dead, but still in shackles and handcuffs.

Keghan Cosh was in the next compartment, but was able to see Joseph collapse onto the floor.

“Just before Williams Lake, I could see that his hand was just blue. He was going under. He was done. He needed a naloxone shot and he would have been fine,” Cosh said in an interview from Fraser Regional.

“We were banging (on the van walls) at this time, maybe 10 or 20 minutes before Williams Lake. Maybe for half an hour, we were like screaming at the top of our lungs: ‘This guy is in overdose. Pull over, man.’”