Justice Will Prevail, Satisfying No One

"He turned and looked at me like he was going to be sick. He said, 'I don't know what happened ... It just went off ... I just wanted to scare them. It just went off'."
"Once I saw the collision, I took off running for the house."
"As they pulled him out that's when I saw what looked to be the barrel of a gun with no stock come out with the driver. It was laying between his legs and, as they pulled him, it came out with him."
Sheldon Stanley, son of second-degree murder suspect Gerald Stanley, Battleford, Saskatchewan

The trial of 56-year-old Saskatchewan farmer Gerald Stanley is underway in Battleford, Saskatchewan. Mr. Stanley has pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder although it was his discharging of a gun that seems to have been responsible for the death on August 9, 2016, of Colten Boushie, 22, a Cree man from the Red Pheasant First Nation.Mr. Boushie had driven, with four friends, on to the rural property of Mr. Stanley. Mr. Stanley's 28-year-old son was the first to testify for the defence.

Fatally shot in the back of the head after a brief altercation on the Stanley farm in the Rural Municipality of Glenside, Mr. Boushie's family and friends and supporters are understandably upset at the fact that there were no Indigenous jury members accepted for this trial though plenty were available; scrutiny released them from jury duty. The jury is comprised solely of whites, and the grieving family and community suspect the fairness of the justice to be meted out in this most unfortunate of cases leading to the death of a young man.

Area members of the farming community are in support of Mr. Stanley, claiming that it is their right to protect life and property from those seeking to criminally access property not their own. The Aboriginal community insist that the death of the young man will lead to a miscarriage of justice because initially the investigating RCMP spoke of a possible criminal intent of robbery led the five young aboriginals onto private property.

One of the five friends in the vehicle that day, Eric Meechance, testified of their plans to go drinking and swimming at a nearby waterhole for the day. They first drove to the home of Boushie's grandmother and there they drank Crown Royal and shot at targets in the backyard, using a .22-calibre long-barrel rifle that had accompanied them in the SUV owned by one of the five, Kiora Wuttunee. The company was completed with two young women, girlfriends of Boushie and of another young man in the group.

From the grandmother's property they drove to a nearby river where they swam for an hour, then left in the grey SUV, sustaining a flat tire on the way. Meechance testified their having driven onto a property pulling up alongside a truck. The SUV driver, Cassidy Cross, asked for someone to give  him something he could hit the truck windshield with, and he was handed that same rifle and the stock smashed the window. Then they drove off the farm, the SUV's muffler trailing, the flat tire driven on its rim.

From there Cross drove the SUV onto the Stanley property, where Cross exited the SUV and jumped onto a quad (all-terrain vehicle) which he was unable to get moving. That's when they heard someone shouting, leading Cross to leap back into the SUV. Then something cracked the SUV's windshield. They hit a parked SUV backing up at which point Meechance and Cross began running off, then heard two gunshots. What Mr. Stanley's son Sheldon described fairly well meshed with that account.

Sheldon Stanley testified he had been busy helping his father build a gate for a fence. His mother was mowing the lawn. Both men heard a loud vehicle drive into the yard as the grey SUV pulled up beside a gold truck. They watched as someone jumped out of the SUV, got into the gold truck and rummaged through it. The SUV then moved toward the shed and he heard one of his father's quads being started. When the person on the quad saw the younger Stanley running toward them he leaped back into the vehicle to drive off.

Sheldon then smashed the front windshield of the SUV with a hammer, and Cross began backing it away, as the Stanleys watched it "take a hard 45-degree turn" into Lisa Stanley's parked SUV. The younger Stanley had dashed into the farmhouse for keys to the vehicle, planning to follow the grey SUV to apprehend them. As he ran out of the house and into the yard he heard shots. His mother shouted at him to call 911.

At that point the two young women exited the back seat of the SUV and one opened the driver's door, pulling the driver, Colten Boushie, then dead, out of the driver's seat. The women then turned and attacked Sheldon's mother, pulling her to the ground, repeatedly striking her. Then they simply walked away, walked away and out of the farm property. Sheldon was asked by the Crown prosecutor if he had noticed a weapon in the vehicle before Boushie was shot, and he responded he had not.

He was asked by Crown prosecutor Bill Burge if anyone in the SUV had spoken to Sheldon or his father and again he responded, no. An RCMP constable informed the court of a police report responding to calls of a trespass on a nearby farm, the Fouhy farm. Constable Andrew Park recounted that a broken barrel of what is believed to be the same rifle was discovered on the Fouhy farm. The vandalism there was comprised of a broken truck windshield, the suspicious vehicle described as a grey SUV with a flat tire and dragging muffler.

All of which comprised fairly damning evidence of five young people, likely in various stages of inebriation (Meechance had said they had fallen asleep in the moving SUV just before it arrived at the Stanley farm), routinely it seemed looking out to indulge in some mischief on private property, explaining in large part area farmers' contentions that they were entitled to protect their property from vandals.

That they were in a state, however mild of alcohol intoxication, had with them a rifle, were seen destroying property and seeming to engage in efforts at appropriation of property, points to a series of misadventurous and malicious sociopathy leading to an accidental death.

Petty crime is no excuse for an over-reaction induced by an atmosphere of earned mistrust, but it does go a long way to explaining why the two solitudes, the Indigenous community where the unemployed and sociopathic young grate on the nerves of the white farming community who believe their hard work in enabling them to acquire property should be respected become targets of illicit activities.

Such a dreadful outcome as the death of a young man in a disharmonious environment such as that described was perhaps inevitable; farmers carrying shotguns for 'protection' from thieves in their trucks and tractors;  young people carrying rifles for target practise in their vehicles.