Sgt. Ed Adamson headed up the Emergency Task Force on that day. He wanted to storm the restaurant, knowing that Sweet had been shot and was in critical condition.

But he was ordered to stand down.

And obeying that order -- after arduously arguing against it -- haunted him to his grave.

By the time Adamson was given the good-to-go, and he stormed into the tear-gas soaked pizza joint with Gary Leuin of the ETF, and Barry Doyle of 52 Division, bullets flying everywhere, Michael Sweet had already slipped away.

But there was Adamson, so overcome by the tear gas that he eventually had to be hospitalized, but trying nonetheless to give mouth-to-mouth rescue to a fellow officer who was already lying dead on the kitchen floor.

The imagery is overwhelming.

Now, after years of fighting the system for closure through truth, Eddie Adamson's family has finally been told by the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board (WSIB) that it had finally accepted the true cause of Adamson's death.

And it was not suicide.

It was post traumatic stress disorder.

"What we did in pursuing the WSIB was not just for us. It was more to help the widows and widowers of other police officers who may one day take their own life," said Eddie Adamson's daughter, a detective on another police force. "And it was for my father's good name.

"What happened to his life is just tragic."

OPP Commissioner Julian Fantino was a Toronto homicide cop back then, and at the scene when the drama unfolded, and Craig and Jamie Munro somehow lived through the assault after taking in a hail of gunfire.

Jamie Munro, in fact, has three-quarters of his stomach blown away, yet today he still lives and breathes.

As Fantino wrote in his book, Duty, The Life of a Cop, "Why they would live and Michael Sweet would die, I will never know. It's a question I've asked myself a thousand times."

It is a question, however, that Eddie Adamson had the answer to, and it was an answer that destroyed him.

"Eddie always felt that if he had not followed that order, Michael Sweet would be alive today," says Fantino.

"And he carried that to his grave."

Reached at his office in Orillia, Fantino said he supported the Adamson family's application to the WSIB -- the reasoning behind its recent decision protected by privacy law, said a WSIB spokesman, and therefore not open for comment.

The reasoning, however, is obvious to those who were there that day, and to those who knew Eddie Adamson.

"You must remember, Eddie Adamson was a very brave man," says Fantino. "But he deteriorated greatly following that incident. It was a pivotal point in his life -- that 'what if?'

"It nagged him. It consumed him."

Edward William John Adamson "retired" from the Toronto Police Force on Jan. 31, 1994 after 26 years and seven months of service, and 14 years of post traumatic hell.

He had "just burned out," says Art Lymer, former president of the old Metro Toronto Police Association.

It was Lymer, in fact, who assisted in initiating the process -- way back in 1993 -- of helping Eddie Adamson or convince what was then the Workers' Compensation Board that his "burn out" was not just some figment of his imagination, but a direct and clinical result of what happened (and didn't happen) at George's Bourbon St.

It had truly broken Adamson's psyche.

From that day onward, Adamson was never the same and, eventually, the solace of a drink was never far away.

"I had a lot of time for Eddie Adamson," says Fantino. "But, no matter how many times I saw him, no matter how many times we talked of other things, that day would always come up in our conversations.

"He could never put closure to it."

To this day, even Adamson's family cannot shake the Munro brothers and, as a result, Adamson's daughter, for one, does not want her name published.

While Craig Munro, the 56-year-old triggerman, is still in prison serving life for first-degree murder, his younger brother, Jamie, got parole and slipped off to Italy in 1994 under an assumed name, and is today vying for his unwanted return.

"These individuals have been a threat to my family since that night and, of course, I will always have concerns for my family's safety," the daughter says.

Eddie Adamson's widow, Linda, meanwhile, requested that former police union president Art Lymer speak on her behalf.

"I'm just not up to it," she says.

According to Lymer, the WSIB's decision will produce merely a "minor adjustment" in the spousal pension.

"But that is not the reason we fought for this. It is not the reason it was done. The money is insignificant," says Lymer.

"It was done to clear Eddie Adamson's name, and that mission has now been accomplished.

"Finally he can be at peace with himself.

"It's justice at last."

Add your name to those who care about justice for these past officers and their survivors -- go to LODSs now.