Wellstead was on her way home from work around 10:30 p.m. when she stopped at Starbucks at 19th and Cambie for a coffee. Smelling smoke, she walked outside to see what was burning, but all she could see was a woman sitting at an outside table, talking calmly on her phone as clouds of smoke rolled past her.
"She's on her cellphone, having her coffee and she's sitting amongst this acrid smoke," she said.
Looking further, Wellstead found a man slumped on a bench in a nearby alcove on the side street, wrapped in a comforter that was on fire.
"It was smouldering, and it was by his face," she said. "It was all orange, and there was smoke. I threw the blanket on the ground and tried to wake him up, but he didn't wake up."
She ran back into Starbucks for water to put out the fire, and that's when she got a real shock.
She said another woman customer standing at the counter told her: "Just leave him alone, he's a homeless person," Wellstead recalled. "I looked at her and I said, 'What are you talking about?'
"And she says, 'He's homeless, just forget it.' "
Appalled, Wellstead rushed back out with water to douse the fire and still couldn't wake the man, so she ran inside again and asked a barista to call for help.
"I said, 'You'd better call an ambulance, because I can't wake him up,' and the lady [customer] said, 'Don't call the hospital, they don't want him,' and I just looked at her, and I said, 'I work at the hospital and yeah, we want him.' "
Wellstead finally woke the man and got him sitting up as they waited for the ambulance. He told her he was prone to seizures and believed he had one while he was smoking, wrapped in his comforter against the night chill.
Wellstead said she didn't believe he suffered serious burns. The fire and ambulance crews who answered the call were great, she said, and treated him with respect as they took him away to St. Paul's Hospital.
The ambulance service confirmed a man was taken to St. Paul's after the incident. CanWest News could not obtain information on his condition Tuesday.
The well-dressed customer who made the callous remarks sat alone in her car at the curb, sipping her coffee and watching as the event unfolded.
Wellstead went home, but she was still upset Tuesday morning. "I can't get my head around it," she said. "I'm so upset. I was almost in tears.
"I know there are a lot of homeless people here and I know some of them can be annoying, but this was a human being.
"His blanket was on fire."
