When the people of Moccasin Flats needed a rapid health intervention, someone to bring them back from the brink of death, Hank Hayden was usually there to answer the call.
As the first aid guy in the city’s most notorious encampment, Hank was a vital lifeline, always willing and ready to come running. Most times it was an opiate user who needed an emergency Naloxone injection.
He was also handy with a needle and thread and stitched up knife wounds, and one day even picked buckshot out of the back of a Moccasin Flats resident targeted by someone with a shotgun.
“They don’t call 911, they come to me,” is what he would say.
Hank took pride in the fact that in 2 ½ years of living at Moccasin Flats nobody under his watch died of an accidental overdose.
Whether it was gunshot wounds, stab wounds, or the dozens of ODs he was called to, Hank utilized his industrial first aid skills to patch people up without getting the authorities involved.
No questions, no reports.
On some days he’d have as many five overdose victims to deal with and some of those people he brought back three or four times in the same week.
“He couldn’t do drugs, he was too busy saving people and I tried to explain to him, ‘you’ve saved so many people, you need help mentally, because you have to have something wrong with you,’” said Doug Tyers, Hank’s friend for 40 years.
“They wouldn’t go see the doctors, they were too scared. Guys in wars don’t go through that many deaths or have to save that many people, or people shot and that. With what he’s seen, he should have had a psychiatrist talking to him every week. That guy was a good guy, he saved a lot of people.”
Hank was the voice of the homeless, the "mayor" of Moccasin Flats who represented the unhoused people in meetings with civic politicians, city staff and the business community. He was the one guy people of the encampments could always count on to be there for them, because he lived with them, and now he’s dead.
Hank, 66, was found deceased in his tent Sunday afternoon. The results of an autopsy to confirm the cause of death have not been released.
“He took care of everybody,” said Tyers.” He was focused all about people other than himself. The downtown core is really going to miss him.”
On Wednesday, Hank’s contributions to the city were celebrated at the Healing Fire, a monthly gathering in front of the courthouse, and about 200 people came for the two-hour event.
Hank earned his reputation as a warrior for injustice who spoke up for anybody he thought was getting a raw deal and that’s what drove him to form the not-for-profit society – Building a Healthy Community – The Voices Project.
Alan Huggett, one of the society’s board members, has known Hank for 30 years. They worked together at Camp Trapping, the now-defunct wilderness camp south of the city for male youth inmates in the corrections system. He said Hank approached him two years ago to help him in his push to create more affordable housing and advocate for the city’s homeless population.
“In the two years that Hank was down at Moccasin Flats there were no deaths from overdoses at Moccasin Flats, whereas in that same time period, there’s been over 90 deaths in Prince George,” said Huggett. “To me, that speaks tons about what Hank was doing in the community – going into people’s tents when they were overdosing, starting the first aid response and getting ambulances and the fire department to attend so people would survive down there.
“I’d like to see something happen where we keep going with the ideas that Hank had, helping people that are homeless and reducing stigma.”
Akhil Kumar, who works for Carrier Sekani Family Services, was encouraged by Hank’s commitment to make a difference in the community, using his connections, and joined the group as a director. After several months of group meetings the society became registered in September.
“Hank was a great advocate for people, and every time you see him he was helping someone of going to help someone, he was just such a kind human being,” said Kumar. “His ideology around building the society was that people who we’re trying to support, their voices should be heard, their opinions should matter and they should have a role in how policies are framed and what rules and regulations are going to be made around them.”
“It’s tough (to continue the society), because he was the driving force, but we still want to keep his ideology and his thoughts alive and we want to continue doing what he has wanted is to do. It will be hard to fill his position, he was one of a kind, there’s nobody like him.”
Hank planned on hosting a weekly podcast – The Voice From the Tent – to discuss some of the issues of street people and homelessness in Prince George and around the world. He had a sponsor lined up, found someone who had the equipment and made arrangements in place to produce the show with different guests each week, starting early in the new year. He was on the verge of seeing his dream visualized and now it’s gone.
“He was going to have his own podcast in his tent,” said Juanita Hyslop, program director for the Association Advocating for Women and Community. “He was just a loving guy that was down there that was willing to help anyone. He was our point of contract, for the agencies, to get in there and get to know the clients.”
Born in Bella Coola, the oldest of eight children, Hank was raised in a foster home that had 14 kids. He grew up in the coastal community as part of the Nuxalk Nation, attended Sir Alexander Mackenzie Secondary School in nearby Hagensborg and moved to Prince George when he was 14, where he quickly developed street smarts which served him well in the three or four years he worked in downtown Prince George as a curbside counsellor.
Daryl Goll, a youth counsellor for Intersect Youth & Family Services, got to know him in the late 1970s when Hank became one of the city’s first youth outreach workers. Hank had no formal training as a social worker but learned quickly how to get his message and life lessons through to his clients.
“He was one of the first people who got a chance to ply his trade on the streets, and he was really good,” said Goll, who also worked with Hank at Camp Trapping. “He connected with the kids, he had a really soft mannerism. He took a program from a bunch of us that were aboriginal first-line defenders and he learned so much.
“The program was core to his being and he took it to heart. I’ve never seen anybody with a bit of knowledge excel like he did, he really did a good job. For a man as humble as Hank was, his passion was unmatched.”
Hank’s warm, welcoming personality won him friends wherever he went, and he put that charm to work as a former bartender at the Coast Inn of the North, Columbus Hotel and Triad Racquet club.
His career path eventually led him to the mining industry, where he worked a portable diamond drill to obtain core samples hunting for precious metals in the mountains of northwestern BC. He was an on-site medic and got his Level 3 occupational first aid ticket later in his career.
Hank was booked for hernia surgery and was waiting for a confirmation from the hospital, but was otherwise in good health. He knew how to survive the elements in a tent and kept his wood stove stoked whenever it got cold.
“He diamond-drilled way up in the mountains in the middle of winter, living in a tent like he has been, that’s why he didn’t mind it, it reminded him of his work,” said Tyers.
Prince George Mayor Simon Yu got to know Hank soon after he was elected in October 2023. A few days before he died, Hank told Yu he wanted to set up a meeting with the dozen or so remaining Moccasin Flats residents to make arrangements for storing their belongings before they made the move into temporary housing units.
“Between my office and the community at large, the homeless population, he was my primary conduit in terms of understanding their needs and what they were facing,” said Yu. “Whenever I needed to know how they were doing or the approximate number, in any situation I could call him and find out.”
“It was really largely due to his efforts that things like the warm-up centre and various small programs down at Moccasin Flats and downtown were put in place.”
Because his daughter Tamara was living there, Hank got involved in the Millennium Park encampment along First Avenue. His life revolved around Tamara and he was there to save her life one day last summer at Moccasin Flats with a shot of Naloxone when her heart stopped after an overdose.
Hank knew everybody who was living in the First Avenue camp and used his connections to explain to residents what was going to happen to their belongings and what their options were for alternate living arrangements which was key in preventing violence when the city dismantled that camp in September 2023.
“I got to know everybody there because of him and it was because of him that we had probably one of the most peaceful decampments in BC,” said Yu.
“These kind of communications are built through trust and that trust was there over time, and that was his legacy for the city. Now we’re on the very edge of getting all the people off the encampment because we have enough units and we’re just waiting for the program to roll to put people in supportive housing. He was (going to be) one of the last ones to leave (Moccasin Flats) until everybody else had their place.”
Prince George Fire Rescue leaned on Hank to reduce the risk of fatalities, the worst fear of every firefighter. When there was a safety issue that needed to be addressed, deputy chief Clay Sheen got in touch with Hank to get that message out to everybody in the camp and it worked. Despite the dozens of fires at Moccasin Flats, most of which were believed to be purposely set by unwelcome visitors as an act of vengeance, nobody was injured in any of those fires, except for one victim who was doused with gasoline and purposely set on fire.
Goll knew about Hank’s situation living in a tent in a troubled area and tried to encourage him to return to Bella Coola, where he had a house and five acres reserved for him, just to get away from the stress of that lifestyle, but he never did.
“I told him, ‘get out of town, take care of yourself, something he didn’t do very well,” said Goll.
Hank never got in the habit of posting on social media but during a heat wave in the summer of 2022, he offered some timely advice on his Facebook page.
“Drink Lots of water in AM and all day, heat stroke is deadly to everything that has breath, Help and look out for each other like kids, grandkids, your team mates, pets and etc. We are in this together. PEACE OUT”
In his last post, later that year, he put up a viral video of a puppy chasing a deer around somebody’s yard and added one simple comment: “Love one another.”
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