A telecommunication company facing a lawsuit over a man’s death during a 911 outage is alleging the man caused or contributed to his own death — and is calling for the case to be thrown out.
Dean Switzer, 55, died of a heart attack at his home in Fisher Branch, Man., on March 23, 2025, according to a statement of claim filed in Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench in January.
His brother Greg filed the suit against Telus, alleging that Dean’s wife and neighbours — all Telus customers — made approximately 20 calls to 911 during the emergency, none of which connected.
“Rather, every time an attempt was made, each caller received an automated message that the call could not be completed and that they should [hang] up and try their call again later,” the claim reads.
For the next 45 minutes, the filing claims Dean’s neighbours performed CPR while still trying to contact 911. Help only arrived after a neighbour reached a friend who was an RCMP officer, who contacted Emergency Medical Services directly and dispatched an ambulance.
Dean was pronounced dead when it arrived approximately 15 minutes later.
The suit argues Telus was responsible for ensuring its customers had uninterrupted access to 911, claiming that had the service been operational, Dean would have received timely care and survived.
But in a statement of defense filed Tuesday, Telus denies it was responsible for ensuring uninterrupted access to 911 emergency services and denies it had a “duty at law” to do so.
“TELUS says Dean’s death was caused or contributed to by Dean’s own negligence or contributory negligence,” the four-page filing reads.
Telus pointed to Dean’s alleged service agreement, which it claims states that service “may fail or be interrupted for many reasons” — including network maintenance and technical limitations — and that Telus “does not guarantee service availability.”
“TELUS will not be liable for loss of profits, data, earnings or business opportunities, economic loss, punitive damages or any other loss caused by use or failure of the service or any device use with the service,” reads the alleged service terms cited in the filing.
Telus further denies Dean’s death was caused by the outage, arguing he “would not have survived in any event.” The filing seeks to have the case dismissed with costs.
As CTV News previously reported, the outage lasted 38 hours and 15 minutes between March 22 and 24, 2025, leaving some Telus customers unable to reach 911 — including on the night Dean died.
READ MORE: Telus has filed its final report on a 911 outage, but critical details are redacted
Following an investigation, Telus pointed to Bell — Manitoba’s 911 network provider and CTV News’ parent company — saying the disruption originated on Bell’s side of the system and caused Telus’s 911 lines to fail. Telus also said a technician sent to investigate failed to alert supervisors that the emergency system was compromised.
Bell countered that every service provider except Telus was able to place emergency calls that night. At the time, Telus said it had made “enhancements” to its 911 call routing protocols following the outage.
CTV News has reached out Greg Switzer’s lawyer for comment.
None of the claims have been tested in court.
