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in Newfoundland | | Report
published | March
for Justice | Deputy Chief Wiks
discreditable conduct hearing for lying to media | Senger
and Hartwig |
Inquiry into
the freezing death of Neil Stonechild (2)
Officer calls investigator
'dismissive'
Betty Ann Adam, The StarPhoenix,
October 09, 2003
A Saskatoon police constable
says he was "very frustrated" that the investigator
looking into the 1990 freezing death of Neil Stonechild dismissed
information that might have answered questions about how the
Saulteaux youth got to the remote north industrial area where
his body was found.
Const. Ernie Louttit told the
inquiry looking into Stonechild's death that investigator Sgt.
Keith Jarvis was "argumentative" and "dismissive"
when Louttit went to him with concerns about the case in January
1991, about a month after the death.
On Dec. 4, 1990, less than
a week after Stonechild's frozen body was found, the youth's
brother told Louttit he had heard Neil was at a party in the
north end of the city and had been beaten and dumped by two brothers
with whom he had previously had a dispute, Louttit said, referring
to his notes from that time.
Louttit, then a three-year
member of the police service, passed the information on to the
major crimes unit.
He pulled the Stonechild file
to see what information had already been gathered and made a
copy of the documents in the file. He was disturbed to see that
on Dec. 5, Jarvis had already concluded the death was accidental.
In his report, Jarvis dismissed
tips about the brothers dropping off Stonechild as "unfounded
and directed more toward causing disharmony on the street against"
the brothers.
The brothers cannot be identified
under the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
Louttit said he wondered why
the investigation had ended when there was still no explanation
for how Stonechild got to the vacant field a few blocks from
the Saskatoon Correction Centre.
He doubted Jarvis' theory that
a 17-year-old would go to the adult jail and wanted to know what
had become of Stonechild's missing shoe and a ball cap he usually
wore. The tip about the party had also not been checked out.
Louttit visited Stonechild's
grieving mother, Stella Bignell, who was still waiting for answers
about how her son had died.
"I felt that she was being
treated poorly in regard to this investigation . . . . It screamed
for attention, to be dealt with. It was wrong not to be able
to say to her, 'We have done every thing we can . . . we have
left no stone unturned.' It was unfair," Louttit said.
Louttit said he thought Stonechild's
race or social stature had led to discrimination in the way the
case was handled.
Louttit kept his copy of the
file in a trunk at home and was able to turn it over to the RCMP,
who reopened the case in 2000. The police copy of the file has
not been found.
After the January 1991 meeting
with Jarvis, Louttit thought he risked being reassigned to a
desk job if he persisted in questioning Jarvis about the case.
He told Bignell, in an awkward
conversation, that he would not be able to do anything more for
her.
Louttit said if he had ever
encountered another case handled the same way, he would have
quit the Saskatoon police.
The file documents Louttit
copied shed new light on an allegation by Stonechild's friend,
Jason Roy, who has testified he saw Stonechild in the back seat
of a police car, with blood on his face and screaming, "they're
gonna kill me."
The documents include a handwritten
statement by Roy, dated Nov. 30, 1990, in which Roy says nothing
about seeing Stonechild in the back of a police cruiser. It says
he and Stonechild were separated while they were at an apartment
building looking for a friend and that he blacked out for the
rest of that night.
Roy testified he was intimidated
into giving that statement while in police custody, probably
on Dec. 20. He said he "lied to save (his) life" and
was released after making the false statement.
Louttit had a copy of that
statement by Dec. 5, 1990, proving it couldn't have been drafted
on the 20th.
After being warned off the
case, Louttit checked the file some time later anyway. He found
that Jarvis had made no mention of their meeting and had not
done any more investigation.
The file did contain the autopsy
and toxicology reports and a document that did not seem related
to the Stonechild case. It pertained to a manslaughter trial
in which two accused had been acquitted.
Louttit didn't remember the
names and he didn't copy the file because he wasn't supposed
to be looking at it.
When asked in cross-examination
how the case should have been handled, Louttit said the investigator
should have gone to the scene, conducted an intensive search
for the shoe, interviewed people who might have been involved
and run a Crime Stoppers segment on television to prompt the
memories of people who might not realize what they had seen.
"All those things could
have been done in very short order, with very little effort and
they weren't," Louttit said.
Louttit said the police service
is a good organization now and that officer training has improved
"a lot" since then.
Louttit said he never once
heard a rumour police might have dropped Stonechild off in the
sparsely developed area.
If he had, he said, he "absolutely"
would have gone to a higher ranking officer with the information
or even outside the department to the RCMP.
Earlier in the day, Jason Roy
was denied an application for standing at the inquiry, which
would provide him funding to have a lawyer at the inquiry full
time who would be allowed to cross-examine witnesses.
Inquiry commissioner, Justice
David Wright, ruled it would be inappropriate for Roy to have
standing.
Roy's lawyer, John Parsons,
who stood in for an ill Darren Winegarden, responded that he
will seek an injunction to have the proceedings, now in their
fourth week, halted while he attempts to appeal Wright's decision.
The inquiry continues today
at the Sheraton Cavalier.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Brothers linked to case:
Police received reports that Stonechild was beaten
Betty Ann Adam, The
StarPhoenix, October 8, 2003
Police had information in 1990 that implicated
two brothers in Neil Stonechild's death, an inquiry into the
case heard Tuesday.
Retired staff sergeant Raymond
Pfeil said he answered the Crime Stoppers phone on Dec. 2, 1990,
three days after the Saulteaux youth's frozen body was found
in a field in the city's north industrial area, and took a report
from Kilburn Hall youth worker Diana Fraser.
Fraser had information from
a woman who claimed her boyfriend had assaulted Stonechild about
a month earlier in which "they almost killed him."
Pfeil's report on the Crime
Stoppers call indicates two brothers "are responsible for
assaulting Stonechild at the location he was found on 57th Street,
had some of his clothing taken, and left to die.
"This information is supposed
to have come from the girlfriend of one of the . . . boys and
was at her request that the informant call the police,"
the report states.
The brothers' names can't be
published because of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
"Bad feelings" between
two groups of people were increasing, Pfeil wrote in the report.
The inquiry also heard from
Const. Geoffrey Brand, who was driving a police wagon on Nov.
24, 1990, the night Stonechild's friend, Jason Roy, says he saw
Stonechild bleeding and screaming in the backseat of a police
car.
Brand's notebook reveals that
on Nov. 30, 1990, -- the day after Stonechild's body was found
-- the officer was called to talk to a person in detention and
was told that Stonechild and another youth had stolen firearms
in one or more break-ins. They had tried to sell the guns to
the brothers but the transaction resulted in a dispute and Stonechild
was beaten.
The informant (Brand couldn't
remember who it was but thought it was probably a man) also said
Stonechild had been threatened two weeks after the fight.
Brand dictated a report on
the information but never received any questions about it from
the investigator.
He never saw the report after
it was typed and doesn't know what became of it. He assumes it
became part of the Stonechild file.
That document has not surfaced.
The Pfeil report and some other
documents from the file, are only available now because Const.
Ernie Loutit had copies of them at his home, commission lawyer
Joel Hesje said.
Stonechild's family has said
Loutit told them he would try to find out how the youth died,
even though he wasn't officially assigned to the case. At one
point, however, the officer told a family member he had been
threatened by superiors with discipline if he continued. He cut
off contact with the family after that, they said.
The commission has also attempting
to subpoena one of the brothers but has been unable to locate
him, Hesje has said.
On Tuesday it heard that none
of the five police officers who went to the place where Stonechild's
body was found felt it responsible to make sure the investigation
ruled out foul play.
That responsibility would have
fallen to investigator Keith Jarvis, who was assigned to the
case, but he didn't attend the scene.
In his absence, patrol sergeant
Michael Petty, identification unit officers Robert Morton and
John Middleton, the first officer on the scene, Rene Lagimodiere,
and dog handler Const. Gregory Robert simply attempted to preserve
the evidence.
Nobody took the responsibility
to look for Stonechild's missing shoe, even though the sock on
the right foot was worn completely through on the heel and the
rest of it blackened.
Robert told the inquiry that
he brought a police dog to look for large objects that might
be useful to the investigator in the case.
Robert said the body had been
in the snowy field in the north industrial area for too long
to emit a scent for the dog to follow. Instead, the dog searched
for Stonechild's missing running shoe and any other evidence
in the vacant field bordered by streets and a couple of businesses
in the sparsely developed area.
The 15-minute search came up
empty but Robert was not instructed to look further.
It would have been the investigator's
decision to order an expanded search to see if there were tracks
in the parking lot or out along the roadway, which might have
indicated how the youth got to the remote location, Robert said.
The senior officer at the scene
testified Monday that he wasn't bothered that an investigator
might not come to the scene. He didn't consider the unusual circumstances
of the youth being in the remote location, his missing shoe or
injuries on his face when he ruled out foul play in his own mind.
On Tuesday Pfeil agreed under
cross examination by Don Worme, the Stonechild family's lawyer,
that that disinterest in the case was "bad policing."
Pfeil recounted an incident
in his own experience as a patrol sergeant, where two morality
section officers were reluctant to investigate the death of an
elderly aboriginal woman as a possible homicide.
Pfeil insisted that the coroner
and identification unit be brought in and by the end of the day,
it was determined that foul play had occurred, but didn't believe
the initial reluctance had anything to do with the victim being
aboriginal.
Like others police witnesses,
Pfeil cannot find his notebook from the period surrounding the
death.
Unlike other officers, Pfeil
said he has never destroyed his notes from his first 25 years
with the Saskatoon police -- he has hundreds of them in the basement
at home -- but his exhaustive searches since 2000 when RCMP first
asked for them, have all failed to turn up these particular books.
Brand surprised Hesje when
he produced his notebook Tuesday, saying he had found it just
the night before. The commission adjourned so that seven lawyers
representing those with standing at the commission could examine
the notebooks.
They found that on the Nov.
24-25 overnight shift, Brand hadn't noted a single incident.
Everything he recorded that night was keyed directly into the
on-board computer, he said.
The notes did reveal the informant
conversation.
Under cross examination by
lawyers representing constables Brad Senger and Larry Hartwig,
Pfeil said he knew the officers and couldn't imagine either of
them leaving a young person to fend for himself on the outskirts
of the city.
When asked by Worme if he could
imagine former constables Dan Hatchen and Ken Munson abandoning
a man in cold weather, Pfeil said he couldn't have imagined that
either.
Hatchen and Munson were fired
from the Saskatoon police in 2001 after they were convicted of
forcible confinement for abandoning Darrel Night, a Cree man,
on the outskirts of the city in January 2000. They were sentenced
to eight-month jail terms.
On Tuesday Pfeil also said
a re-organization of the Saskatoon Police Service in 1989 and
1990 eliminated specialized sections and resulted in officers
sometimes handling cases for which they had no special training.
The special sections system
was brought back about a year later, he said.
Silas Halyk, lawyer for the
Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations, was skeptical about
the coincidence of Pfeil having three different roles in the
Stonechild case, including acting staff sergeant on the day the
body was found, the person responsible for processing the report
from Lagimodiere five days later and the officer who answered
Fraser's Crime Stoppers phone call.
Pfeil agreed it was coincidental
but said that's how it happened.
Halyk also asked whether the
Saskatoon police service created a "shadow police force"
to follow the RCMP after its investigation started in the wake
of the Night case.
Pfeil said he had never heard
of such a thing.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Stonechild witness foggy
on details
Betty Ann Adam, The StarPhoenix,
September 26, 2003
The person closest to Jason
Roy the night he says he saw Neil Stonechild in the back of a
police car could not clearly remember what he told her that night.
Cheryl Antoine, who was 15
and pregnant with Roy's child in November 1990, wept Thursday
as she told the commission of inquiry into Stonechild's death
about events surrounding the last time she saw Stonechild alive.
Antoine began her testimony
with certainty but floundered under cross-examination as she
was confronted with two statements she gave RCMP investigators
in 2000.
Antoine told commission lawyer
Joel Hesje, during examination in chief, a detailed account of
Roy telling her and friend Julie Binning that Stonechild, 17,
had been picked up by the police, that he (Roy) had given police
a fake name to avoid arrest and had denied knowing Stonechild
when asked if he knew the youth in the back of their car.
Under cross-examination, she
acknowledged telling an investigator with an RCMP task force
looking into the possibility of police involvement in the deaths
of several aboriginal men that she had a "vague" memory
of Roy saying he "thought" he'd seen Stonechild in
a police car.
Roy and Stonechild had spent
part of the night playing cards and drinking at the Binning house
at 3269 Milton St. before setting out on foot around 11 p.m.
The pair were intoxicated and
the weather was bitterly cold, but they wanted food from the
7-Eleven, three blocks away on 33rd Street.
More than an hour later Roy
returned without Stonechild.
He has long maintained that
he and Stonechild separated at the Snowberry Downs apartments
on 33rd Street, where Stonechild was trying to locate a girl
he knew.
Roy says that after stopping
at the 7-Eleven to warm up, he was walking back to the Binning
residence and was stopped by police who had Stonechild in the
back seat. Stonechild had blood on his face and was screaming
Roy's name and saying "they're gonna kill me."
Roy, who was then in breach
of probation, said he gave an alias to avoid arrest and thought
his friend would contact him after he got out of young offender
custody.
Stonechild's frozen body was
found in a field in the north industrial area five days later
on Nov. 29, 1990.
The death by cold exposure
was ruled accidental and police told the media they thought Stonechild
died while trying to walk to the adult correctional centre.
Lawyers representing Stonechild's
family, the police service, the police union, two individual
police officers and the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations
have questioned numerous witnesses trying to determine when Roy
first talked about seeing Stonechild in a police car.
Several witnesses have acknowledged
that because of the passage of time since Stonechild died they
have difficulty distinguishing between their actual memories
and things they have picked up from other people or learned in
the news.
Antoine said that when Stonechild's
mother phoned the Binning residence looking for him the day after
he went missing, neither she nor Roy told her about his being
picked up by the police.
She and Roy were at her residence
at 11th Street and Avenue P South later that week, when Stonechild's
mother phoned and told Roy that Stonechild had died.
Roy told Antoine, "Neil's
dead and I think the police took him," she recalled.
Antoine said she urged Roy
to go to the police with his information but he said, "I
don't know." Thinking he meant he didn't remember, she urged
him "to get hypnotized or something."
"Then we just sat there,
crying," she said.
Antoine said Roy was surprised
to see two diagonal abrasions on Stonechild's nose when he viewed
the body at the funeral. She said Roy said he hadn't seen the
injury before.
Antoine corroborated Roy's
claim that after Stonechild's funeral, two people came to the
house at 11th Street and Avenue P South and asked Roy questions
about the last time he had seen Stonechild.
Antoine's memory differed from
Roy's in that she didn't think he told the pair about seeing
Stonechild in the police car.
She thought the pair were a
male and female dressed in business clothes andsaid that she
didn't know if they were police or counsellors of some sort.
Roy has said that on that occasion
he told a police officer the entire story on condition he not
be arrested on the probation breach.
He has said that weeks later,
on Dec. 20, 1990, he was arrested, placed in a police interview
room and asked if he wanted to reconsider the earlier statement.
He said he made a false statement
clearing the police because he was afraid of them and wanted
to be released.
That statement was submitted
to the commission as an exhibit but it is dated Nov. 30, the
day after Stonechild's body was found.
Oddly enough, records from
the Dec. 20 arrest show that police appear to have turned Roy
over to himself: Jason Roy's name appears in the space where
one of his parents should have been named on a parent's notice
form. The breach of probation was not dealt with at that time
either.
Julie Binning also related
events of Nov. 24, 1990, for the inquiry Thursday.
She recalled that when Roy
returned he said he had "lost" Stonechild.
"He said he might have
been picked up by the police," Binning said.
She also told the RCMP in 2000
that Roy "wasn't sure if it was the police or not"
which picked up Stonechild.
Stonechild's cousin, Bruce
Genaille, also told the inquiry he recalls being stopped by the
police about a week before Stonechild's body was found. He had
been walking from the same 7-Eleven store when a cruiser stopped
him and asked if he was Neil Stonechild.
He gave them his name and showed
them identification but they didn't seem to believe him and persisted
with the question.
He is certain there was nobody
in the back seat of the car at that time.
© Copyright 2003 The
StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Police sometimes 'unarrest'
people
Individuals dropped off someplace other than police detention,
officer tells inquiry
Betty Ann Adam, The StarPhoenix.,
September 25, 2003
A Saskatoon police constable
told the commission of inquiry looking into the 1990 freezing
death of Neil Stonechild that police sometimes use their discretion
in deciding to "unarrest" individuals and drop them
off someplace other than at police detention.
Const. Brett Maki, a 13-year
member of the Saskatoon Police Service, acknowledged that officers
sometimes arrest people and later let them out of the car in
a safe place without making any mention of it in their notes.
The information was elicited
by Silas Halyk, lawyer for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian
Nations, in cross-examination, who has asked every police officer
so far the same question of whether they have knowledge of police
leaving people in places other than police detention.
Drew Plaxton, lawyer for the
police union, had twice before objected to the question, arguing
that it was nothing more than a fishing expedition designed to
bring out information that would tarnish the reputation of the
police.
Plaxton has argued there would
be no way for police to investigate vague allegations of past
incidents. Bringing up other instances would broaden the scope
of the inquiry beyond its mandate, he said.
Halyk and commission lawyer
Joel Hesje both argued in reply that the question goes to the
very heart of the inquiry.
If officers investigating the
Stonechild death knew that police sometimes drop people off in
unauthorized locations, it could affect the way they investigated
the case, Hesje said.
Inquiry commissioner Justice
David Wright twice ruled that the question is legitimate but
that Halyk may not ask for specifics.
Maki said that, for example,
police called to break up a rowdy party might place a person
who doesn't want to leave in the back of the police car. If,
after the other people have dispersed and the individual has
calmed down, the police may give that person a warning and drive
him or her a couple of blocks away, home, to the mall or to some
other safe place, he said.
"The person's placed under
arrest and later he's unarrested and placed either at his home
or another safe place," Maki said.
Under cross-examination by
Donald Worme, the lawyer for Stonechild's family, Maki expanded
on that, saying he doesn't always make a note of it in his notebook.
Maki said he thinks the practice
continues. The last time he did it was sometime last year, he
said.
Maki said policy requires that
he radio the dispatcher and tell them he is giving someone a
ride from one place to another and give the mileage on the vehicle.
In response to a question from
Barry Rossman, lawyer for the Saskatoon Police Service, Maki
acknowledged there is no policy allowing officers to let people
out anywhere other than detention once they have been arrested.
Rossman asked Maki if he was
aware of a policy directive, issued after the 2002 inquest into
the freezing death of Lawrence Wegner, that police are to make
notes every time they have someone in their cars.
"We get a lot of directives
and I'm not up on every one of them," Maki said.
"Perhaps you better get
up on that one," Rossman said.
The inquiry also heard Wednesday
that the first officer on the scene of Neil Stonechild's frozen
body destroyed his notebook within weeks of giving photocopies
of notes about the case to a 2000 RCMP task force looking into
the possibility of police involvement in the deaths of several
aboriginal men, including Stonechild and Wegner.
Rene Lagimodiere told the inquiry
he destroyed all his handwritten notes when he retired in March
2000.
Earlier that month, he had
given a photocopy of the notebook to RCMP Const. Jack Warner
who was investigating the Stonechild death.
Lagimodiere said he can't remember
if he shredded notebooks from 26 years of service or threw them
in a dumpster.
Halyk expressed surprise that
an experienced officer would destroy a piece of evidence in a
case that he knew was currently under investigation.
Lagimodiere said he gave all
the notes he had on the matter to Warner.
"There was nothing in
that notebook I was trying to hide," Lagimodiere said.
Dr. Jack Adolph, the pathologist
who conducted the original, 1990 autopsy on Stonechild's body,
told the inquiry that none of the injuries on the body were traumatic
enough to have caused his death. The abrasions on his face and
other small ones on his knees and torso were consistent with
injuries he has seen on other people who became disoriented before
collapsing from hypothermia.
When shown a photo of handcuffs
superimposed over two diagonal abrasions on Stonechild's nose,
Adolph said he couldn't rule out handcuffs as having caused the
marks but said he didn't think the outside curve of handcuffs
would be rough enough to scratch the skin the way it was.
Adolph said the marks on Stonechild's
nose were abrasions not lacerations, meaning the top layer of
skin was scratched off but the skin break didn't extend right
through the skin.
The scratches could have appeared
deep to a layperson because the nose skin had swelled, as is
a normal part of the thawing process, he said.
Stonechild had blood-alcohol
content of .15, or about twice the legal driving limit, Adolph
said. He didn't think that would be enough to cause the youth
to pass out.
Adolph found a small stone
inside the one shoe Stonechild was wearing when he was found
in a field in the north industrial area of the city.
"I thought it was an unusual
finding for someone found out in the open," he said.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Questions plagued coroner
'Obvious deduction' handcuffs caused wounds: Fern
Betty Ann Adam. The
StarPhoenix, September 24, 2003
The coroner who was called
to the scene of Neil Stonechild's frozen body didn't order an
inquest even though he had many questions that were not answered
by a police investigation.
"He wasn't on the road
and clearly this isn't an area where people normally go walking
in that kind of weather," Dr. Brian Fern told the commission
of inquiry looking into the 1990 freezing death of the Saulteaux
youth.
"This seemed a strange
place to be. So there were questions there to be asked. How did
he get there? Why was he not on the road side?"
Fern said he expected the police
to investigate the death and eventually communicate their findings
to him. They never did and no inquest was called.
Fern acknowledged, under cross-examination
by Silas Halyk, lawyer for the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian
Nations, that as coroner, he was responsible for deciding whether
an inquest was necessary.
It was his responsibility to
answer the questions of the cause of death and the mode of death.
Fern was shown an autopsy photo
of Stonechild's face and the same picture with handcuffs superimposed
over two diagonal lacerations on the nose.
He said it was possible the
lacerations could have been made by the handcuffs and that slight
deviations in the otherwise straight lines could have been caused
by movement of the face as pressure was applied or by the nose
being compressed.
"As an ordinary layman,
it was an obvious deduction," he said.
The picture of handcuffs over
the nose marks "might well have" had a significant
effect on his conclusions if he had seen it in 1990, Fern said.
The marks could also have been
made by fingernails and a thumbnail or by the frozen stalks of
weeds found in the area of the body, he said.
The weeds seemed unlikely to
Fern, who said he thinks the lacerations were made some time
before Stonechild's death because of the way the blood had dried.
Under cross-examination by
Donald Worme, lawyer for Stonechild's family, Fern acknowledged
there were also unanswered questions about why the 17-year-old
had only one shoe and why the sock on the unshod foot was worn
out through the heel and blackened near the ball and toes.
Fern did not order any tests
to determine if there was any trace amounts of blood or other
bodily fluids on Stonechild's clothing.
He never asked the police to
explain why the questions were never answered.
There were no formal guidelines
from the chief coroner's office dictating when an inquest should
be called, other than a statutory requirement for one when an
individual dies while in custody. Each of the province's approximately
200 coroners used his or her own discretion in calling inquests,
he said.
The chief coroner at that time
was Dr. Diane Stephenson, who discouraged inquests because they
were "not free," Fern said.
The operation was in a phase
of transition away from coroners having authority to call inquests
and toward today's more formal procedure in which the chief coroner's
office makes the decision, he said.
Budgetary constraints were
mentioned more than once during Fern's testimony. He said that
in 1990 he was paid $70 per case for each coroner's case he took
regardless of how much work it required. That fee has risen to
$100 per case today, but Fern noted it costs him $150 per hour
just to cover overhead at his medical office.
Such financial constraints
on himself and on police may have prevented them from doing "a
crackerjack" job, he said, noting that things like extensive
laboratory tests are costly.
Fern's original information
for the death certificate showed Stonechild died from exposure
"due to or as a possible consequence of being inebriated."
He also noted beside the word "violence" the word "undetermined."
However, Fern did not include
that much detail on the official death certificate that was submitted
to province's vital statistics branch; that one gives the cause
of death as "accidental, exposure" and includes a note
stating "tests suggest he was mildly inebriated."
The difference wasn't because
he had changed his opinion about the death, he said.
"I'm quite sure I would
have written 'undetermined" if I had given it more thought,"
he said.
Meanwhile, Fern said it was
odd that the toxicology report he ordered was sent to the police
before it was sent to him.
"It was a case of interest
to them for some other reasons," Fern said.
The toxicology report showed
a blood alcohol level of 150 milligrams per 100 milliliters of
blood, or almost twice the legal blood alcohol level for driving.
There was no sign of any other drug use.
After Fern was excused, the
commission brought back Rene Lagimodiere, a retired police officer
who was the first person to the scene after two workers in the
north industrial area discovered the body on Nov. 29, 1990.
Worme cross-examined Lagimodiere
on testimony he gave Monday, pressing him on why he appeared
to dismiss the oddities of the death without at least requesting
the opinion of the area sergeant, whom he could have consulted.
"You exercised discretion
away from calling an investigator," Worme said.
Lagimodiere said that although
he did not ask dispatch to send the patrol sergeant, dispatch
could have sent him anyway. It would have been up to the patrol
sergeant to call a major crimes investigator.
Lagimodiere acknowledged that
there were peculiarities that could well have justified his asking
the patrol sergeant to come and take a look, such as why the
victim was in the area with no obvious transportation, why was
he missing a shoe, where was the shoe, where did he walk to make
his sock so dirty, how did he get the two lacerations across
his nose and other scratches on his cheek?
He also acknowledged that he
didn't investigate the tracks in the snow to try to figure out
just where the victim walked and where the workers who found
him had walked. Nor did he search the parking lot or road for
footprints or signs of a vehicle stopping to eject the person.
Lagimodiere has said he followed
police service policy of not requesting a patrol sergeant, who
would have decided whether to call an investigator because there
were no obvious signs of foul play.
"I wondered how he got
out there but, again, that's not cause for believing there's
some foul play involved," he said.
"What would he need?"
Worme said.
"Would he need a bullet
wound in him? Would he need a knife in his back? What would have
been a real obvious sign of foul play?" Worme asked.
"I don't know. I can't
answer that," Lagimodiere said.
"You exercised that discretion
in favour of, because there is no blood, there's no axe in him,
no knife in him, there's no bullet wound . . . dismissed the
fact he's found out in the middle of nowhere with one shoe on,
with no other reasonable explanation for his being there, you
exercised discretion away from calling an investigator."
Lagimodiere said he thinks
the patrol sergeant did come to the scene. He was also confident
that other investigators would continue with the case.
Lagimodiere returns to the
stand today.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Officer ruled out foul
play
Constable says he followed police procedure
Betty Ann Adam, The
StarPhoenix, September 23, 2003
The first police officer at
the scene of Neil Stonechild's frozen body in a field in the
north industrial area of Saskatoon on Nov. 29, 1990, quickly
surmised there had been no foul play in the Saulteaux teenager's
death.
Rene Lagimodiere on Monday
told the commission of inquiry looking into events surrounding
Stonechild's death that after touching the body and determining
that it was frozen, he followed the police department policy
of using his radio to inform dispatch and to request the police
identification unit and a coroner be sent to the scene.
Lagimodiere said he did not
ask for the patrol sergeant to be sent out, as he would have
done if there had been obvious signs of foul play or of a struggle.
It would have been the patrol
sergeant's decision whether to bring in a major crimes investigator.
Stonechild's family has always
publicly questioned the lack of an in-depth investigation into
the death.
Stonechild's friend, Jason
Roy, had disclosed, as early as one month after the death, that
he had last seen Stonechild in the back seat of a police cruiser,
screaming "they're gonna kill me."
A Kilburn Hall supervisor told
the inquiry Monday that she did not advise Roy to go to the police
with that information.
Police told the press four
months after the death, that they thought Stonechild had been
intoxicated and was walking to the adult jail, located in the
north end of the city a few blocks from where his body was found.
Stonechild was at large from
a community home for young offenders at the time of his death.
The police theory didn't satisfy
his family or the community home operator, Pat Pickard, who has
testified that Stonechild had promised her on the phone the night
he went missing that he would turn himself in to her the next
day.
His body was found five days
later, several kilometres from the place where Roy said he saw
Stonechild in the police car.
On Monday, Lagimodiere said
he also wondered how the victim had come to be in the remote
field, but had followed the police policy, which was that unless
there was an obvious sign of foul play, there was no need to
call an investigator, he said.
Lagimodiere, now retired, was
a constable with 16 years experience at the time. He observed
a set of footprints, which he thought were the victim's, which
began in a parking lot on the 800 block of 57th Street East.
The tracks, which appeared to be several days old, based on the
condition of the snow, led north-northeast through a field toward
58th Street.
The tracks led into a ditch
that runs east-west through the field, where it appeared the
person had fallen and stumbled about before coming back out on
the south side of the ditch and heading back toward 57th Street.
The body was found a short distance south of the ditch.
There were also fresh tracks
left by the two people who found the body.
Lagimodiere did not observe
any animal tracks in the area.
Coroner Dr. Brian Fern came
and examined the body. Fern turned the body over and checked
the chest and stomach for injuries that may have contributed
to the death but didn't find any, Lagimodiere said.
Lagimodiere said Fern estimated
the body had been there several days.
Lagimodiere said he does not
remember noticing two diagonal abrasions on the victim's nose
or scratches on the side of his face.
The victim was wearing a blue
Boy's Town jacket, a red lumberjack shirt and a T-shirt, with
jeans and only one running shoe.
Lagimodiere requested a canine
unit come to look for the victim's missing shoe. It arrived shortly
after the body was taken by ambulance from the scene. The canine
search was brief, lasting only about 15 minutes, he said.
During cross examination, police
union lawyer Drew Plaxton tried to determine whether the snow
appeared to have been crusted over at the time Stonechild walked
and collapsed on it. Plaxton asked whether fresh falling snow
would have been crusted.
Lagimodiere didn't know. He
didn't observe snow on top of the body, as there may have been
if it had snowed after Stonechild collapsed.
Lagimodiere couldn't remember
if the 57th Street parking lot, where the tracks appeared to
have begun, had been graded or driven on or had bare gravel.
He didn't think there were visible footprints on the parking
lot.
Lagimodiere was not aware of
who the victim was and did not know that police had been dispatched
to seek Stonechild five days earlier, on Nov. 24.
Lagimodiere never had any other
connection to the Stonechild case. He said he never heard any
rumours about possible police involvement in the case until 2000,
when an RCMP task force investigator called him at his current
home in Victoria, B.C.
Cross examination of Lagimodiere
will be delayed until after the coroner takes the stand today.
Earlier on Monday, the inquiry
heard from Dianna Fraser, who was a case worker at the Kilburn
Hall closed custody facility where Stonechild and his friend
Jason Roy had both served terms as young offenders.
Fraser said Roy told her within
a month of Stonechild's death that he had been walking from Snowberry
Downs apartments and had seen Stonechild in the back seat of
a police car screaming, "they're gonna kill me man, they're
gonna kill me."
"I believed him,"
Fraser said.
She said she thought it was
after Stonechild's funeral that Roy told her. He had been distraught
and was feeling very guilty, she said.
Fraser is the first witness
to specify a time soon after the death when Roy described seeing
Stonechild in a police car. Other witnesses so far have not been
able to say when Roy first told of seeing Stonechild in the police
car.
Stonechild's mother, Stella
Bignell, has said Roy told her about it sometime after the snow
was gone in 1991.
Another Kilburn Hall worker,
Brenda Valiaho, who talked to Roy in Nov. 1991, while she was
doing a practicum for her master's degree in educational psychology,
has said she thought he was disclosing the incident for the first
time when he described the event to her.
On Monday, Fraser said Roy
told her about the incident while they were "in the community,"
meaning she was not at work and they were not at a detention
facility at the time. If she had been at work, she would have
made a note of it in her work log, she said.
Fraser said she did not advise
him to go to the police with his account because she didn't think
they would believe him.
"I come from communities
where dumping of people who were intoxicated was a common occurrence,"
Fraser said.
"Most people don't believe
our kids. They can tell us things about people in authority but
very few people listen to them," she said.
"I'd be setting him up
for a horrible ride (if I advised him to tell police),"
she said, noting that a predisposition report about Roy that
was read into the inquiry record shows he had recurring conflict
with the law and repeatedly dropped out of school.
Fraser said she had lived in
two other north-central Saskatchewan communities, Leoville and
Big River, in the 1960s and knew that RCMP had dropped off intoxicated
people in places from which they would have a long walk back.
Prior to Roy telling her what
he had seen that night, Fraser had already heard "a flurry
of rumours" from youth who were in custody at Kilburn about
what might have happened the night Stonechild disappeared.
She phoned the police to tell
them she had heard that Stonechild had been at a party attended
by another youth who had "given him a licking," about
a month earlier.
That youth's name cannot be
published under provisions of the Youth Criminal Justice Act.
She also told police people
would be gathering at Stonechild's mother's home after the funeral
and she was concerned that there could be conflict between groups
of people because emotions were running high. She wanted to "curb"
possible trouble at the wake.
About a year later, Fraser
was Roy's case worker while he was in custody at Kilburn Hall.
He was having difficulty sleeping and she thought it would be
helpful for him to have a private session with a worker, so she
recommended he talk with Valiaho.
Fraser didn't attempt to have
an in-depth discussion with Roy because, as a case-worker, their
interviews were done in a room with windows, allowing other youth
to observe if he became emotional. She knew he would have the
privacy to unburden himself if he talked to Valiaho, who did
her sessions in a more private room.
Valiaho has said she thought
Roy's memory was blocked before he told her of seeing Stonechild
in a police car, while using a visualization technique to relive
the event.
The inquiry also heard testimony
of Const. Kevin Lewis who responded on Dec. 20, 1990, to a theft
at the Saan Store at the former Wildwood Mall on Eighth Street,
now the Centre at C ircle and Eighth.
Lewis did not remember anything
about the incident but referred to his handwritten notes and
other documents related to it.
Roy has said that he was arrested
for stealing a purse and was taken to the police station, placed
in an interview room, where he was given a blank form and asked
if he wanted to "reconsider" an earlier statement in
which he described Stonechild in the back of the police car with
blood on his face.
Roy has said he made a false
statement clearing the police because he wanted to get out of
police custody and was afraid of the police. He said the date
on the document he wrote on Dec. 20, 1990 is now dated Nov. 30,
1990 and that he is not the one who changed it.
No other statement has been
presented to the inquiry.
Lewis said Monday he doesn't
recall taking Roy to the police station and doesn't think he
did take him there because the paper work didn't have notations
that would have been made if he had been brought there.
Lewis said he would have done
a police computer check on Roy and would not have brought him
to the station unless there had been a warrant for his arrest.
The inquiry has heard that
Roy was being sought for breach of probation and on suspicion
of robbery.
Documents Lewis filled out
show he released Roy 27 minutes after meeting him at the Saan
Store, probably in a loss prevention security room.
Lewis couldn't remember and
did not have notes on whether he took Roy home, or whether Roy's
mother came to get him at the store or at the police station.
A parents' information notice,
which must be given to a youth's parents upon release, has Jason
Roy's name in the space provided for the name of the parent into
whose custody he is being released.
Lewis said that must have been
a mistake.
The 27-minute interval would
not have been long enough to bring Roy to the station and have
him write a statement, then take him home to Avenue I South in
winter driving conditions on a busy shopping night before Christmas,
he said.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Cops sent to apartment
Stonechild visited
Betty
Ann Adam, The StarPhoenix , September 19, 2003
Two police constables who were
investigated by RCMP in 2000 as suspects in the 1990 death of
Neil Stonechild were dispatched to the apartment complex where
he was seen trying to find a friend.
A police complaint form dated
Nov. 24, 1990, was submitted into evidence at the inquiry looking
into the Saulteaux youth's freezing death. It shows that constables
Larry Hartwig and Bradley Raymond Senger were dispatched.
Stonechild's friend, Jason
Roy, has told the inquiry he was separated from Stonechild at
the apartment complex and later saw him in the back seat of a
police car with blood on his face and screaming, "they're
gonna kill me."
Stonechild's frozen body was
found five days later in a field in the city's north industrial
area.
The complaint was phoned in
at 11:49 p.m. by Trevor Ewart, who had recently arrived home
to his Snowberry Downs apartment, where Lucille Neetz and Gary
Horse were babysitting.
An intoxicated youth, who Ewart
later learned was Stonechild, had walked into the suite but Ewart
had easily pushed him out. The youth apologized and left, Ewart
told the inquiry earlier this week.
Ewart could not recall whether
police came to the apartment to talk to him that night.
Hartwig and Senger were dispatched
again, at 12:18 a.m., Nov. 25, in response to a call that came
in at 11:56 p.m. That call came from Shelly Grigorovich at nearby
O'Regan Crescent.
Grigorovich testified Thursday
she called the police to tell them she had seen a suspicious
person lurking in the area.
She had chased on foot a person
she had discovered crouching behind a truck in her driveway but
the person had gotten away.
Although there had been no
break-in, she wanted to alert police of the suspicious person.
She does not remember if police
came to the house or if she saw a police car that night.
Nor could she remember anything
about the person she had chased part way down the block.
Hartwig and Senger, who have
attended about half of the eight days of hearings so far, do
not fit the description that Roy has long given for the officer
who was driving the car that night.
Roy has said the driver had
a mustache and glasses and that, having seen him elsewhere since,
knows that he is over six feet tall. Neither officer has a mustache
or glasses.
The inquiry also heard Thursday
from the first of many police officers scheduled to testify.
Const. Perry Szabo took the
Nov. 13, 1990, report of Stonechild failing to return to an open
custody community home for young offenders where he was serving
a six-month sentence for break and enter.
The community home operator,
Pat Pickard, has testified she reported Stonechild being unlawfully
at large that day when he failed to return as required.
Szabo referred to his handwritten
notes from Nov. 13, 1990, to recall that Pickard told him Stonechild
was supposed to leave the city the next morning at 8:30 to go
to Valley River, Man.
Pickard has said she is certain
she would not have told police Stonechild had plans to go somewhere
at a scheduled time because if she had known he was going to
be at the bus depot, for example, she would have gone there herself
and apprehended him. As a community home operator, Pickard was
a peace officer.
Szabo said he was not aware
of rumours after Stonechild's death that police may have been
involved in the death.
Earlier in the day the inquiry
heard cross-examination of testimony by Father Andre Poilievre,
who has known Roy for 15 years.
Police union lawyer Drew Plaxton
pointed out that police do have a record of arresting Roy's girlfriend
on Feb. 26, 2000, contrary to what a police liaison officer had
told Poilievre.
Poilievre said Wednesday Roy
had great guilt because he felt he had failed Stonechild by not
helping him the night he saw his friend in a police car. Roy
had also told Poilievre he was afraid of the police.
Poilievre said he began to
think Roy might be justified in thinking police were a threat
to him after a couple of strange incidents.
Roy had told the priest Roy's
girlfriend had been arrested, taken to the police station, strip
searched and released without charges being laid. When Poilievre
had called a school liaison officer he knew, Const. Bob Lorne,
Lorne told him there was no record of such an arrest.
His suspicion took a firmer
hold after he arrived at a house where he had given Roy and his
girlfriend refuge to make them feel safe from police.
It was early in the morning
and a police car slowly cruised by the house, made a U-turn and
went past again, checking out the priest, who had just arrived.
"If it had been an incident
in isolation, I wouldn't have noticed, but given the context,
I came to a conclusion, rightly or wrongly," Poilievre said.
The inquiry also heard from
Flora Binning, who said the house where she lived with her mother
and brother in 1990, at 3269 Milton St., was often the scene
of teenage gatherings.
Stonechild was at her house
drinking alcohol with her boyfriend and other young people on
Nov. 24, 1990. She remembered that he was "between tipsy
and drunk," when he left to get snacks from the store.
She acknowledged, under cross-examination,
that she told RCMP in 2000 that Stonechild left to get more booze.
Binning couldn't remember whether
Roy was with him. She said she may have opened the door to Roy
later that night, but didn't recall.
After Stonechild's death she
heard through Roy's girlfriend at the time that he had seen Stonechild
in the police car.
An RCMP task force was created
in 2000 to investigate the freezing deaths of two aboriginal
men, Rodney Naistus and Lawrence Wegner, whose frozen bodies
were found on the western outskirts of the city in January. Within
days of their deaths, a third Native man, Darrell Night, complained
two police had abandoned him in the same area while he was intoxicated.
Two constables, Dan Hatchen
and Ken Munson, were convicted, fired and were sentenced to eight-month
jail terms.
The commission of inquiry will
take Friday off. It resumes Monday at the Sheraton Cavalier.
Transcripts of the hearings,
schedules and witness lists are posted on the commission's Web
site at www.stonechildinquiry.ca.
© Copyright 2003 The StarPhoenix (Saskatoon)
Mother wants photos to be in public domain
Betty Ann Adam, Saskatchewan
News Network; CanWest News Service, Thursday, September 18, 2003
SASKATOON -- Two diagonal lacerations
across Neil Stonechild's nose could have been made by handcuffs,
photographs from the Saulteaux teenager's 1990 autopsy show.
The commission of inquiry looking
into Stonechild's November 1990 freezing death was shown on Wednesday
a photo of the lacerations and another in which handcuffs were
superimposed over the lacerations.
In an unusual move, Stonechild's
mother, Stella Bignell, requested that commissioner Justice David
Wright not ban publication of the photographs because she wants
full disclosure of the inquiry to the public.
"It is Stella's wish these
images become part of the public domain. It is not a decision
she takes lightly," said her lawyer, Donald Worme.
"As difficult as it is,
(the family) will not prevent the publication of those terrible
images," Worme said.
Bignell stayed away from the
inquiry for the first time Wednesday.
A previous witness, Jason Roy,
has told the inquiry he last saw Stonechild, then 17, in the
back of a police car, with blood on his face, in handcuffs and
screaming, "They're gonna kill me."
Stonechild's frozen body was
discovered five days later, on Nov. 29. 1990 in a remote field
on the outskirts of the city.
Forensic pathologist, Dr. Graeme
Dowling is Alberta's chief medical examiner, who was asked by
the RCMP in 2000 to review photos and coroner's notes from the
1990 autopsy. Later in 2000, Dowling was also asked to preside
over the exhumation and re-examination of Stonechild's body.
By then, the skin had dried
to the point Dowling could no longer detect any of the marks
visible in the 1990 photos. X-rays of the body did not reveal
any bony injuries that would have been new at the time of death.
On Wednesday, Dowling looked
at the 1990 autopsy photos and would say only that the lacerations
are consistent with compression patterns that could have been
made by a blunt object, including handcuffs.
He said it is important to
consider the body, the scene where the body is found and the
history of the individual in determining the cause of death.
He said he wasn't told about the possibility of handcuffs being
involved the first time he was shown the pictures.
Dowling also agreed, however,
with police union lawyer Drew Plaxton, that the marks could have
been made by Stonechild's face falling onto crusty snow or against
the frozen stalks of grasses and tall weeds that are visible
in photographs of the site where he was found.
Dowling said he didn't know
what the snow conditions were at the time of death. Exposed grasses
that would have been under the body could have been covered by
snow at the time and exposed as the warmth from Stonechild's
skin melted it, he said.
When asked whether a curved
handcuff could have made so long a cut on a nose, Dowling said
cartilage in the nose is flexible enough that it could have been
compressed enough to leave the marks, which measure 2.5 cm and
2 cm in length.
Dowling described the lacerations
in pathologist's terms as "minor abrasions" but added
that the term must be understood in the context of the wide range
of injuries a pathologist sees.
Such abrasions are common on
people who die from cold exposure because they become disoriented
and often fall more than once before their final collapse, he
said.
The wound would not have bled
much, certainly not enough to be life threatening, he said. A
bit of "blood-stained fluid, not blood" is visible
to the right of the nose in the photos.
© Copyright 2003 The Leader-Post (Regina)
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