Riot redemption

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 15/04/2017 (3125 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Prior to last month, the last time I had seen Drew Janz was in 1997. We were both locked up in the Winnipeg Remand Centre. Janz was an inmate; I was a guard.

Back then, Janz was a wiry 25-year-old with long hair pulled back in a ponytail. I was a beefy 29-year-old with a buzz cut and polished boots.

Yet, somehow, we established an unlikely friendship.

Unlikely because Janz was labeled with a name reserved for key players in the brutal riot that occurred at Headingley Correctional Institution the year prior.

Janz was a ringleader.

Janz eventually received a four-year prison sentence for his involvement in the violent bloodbath. In the year he spent awaiting trial, he was housed in the special handling unit of the Winnipeg Remand Centre, a unit I’d been assigned to since transferring from Headingley in 1992.

I’m certain my first inclination back then would have been to hate Janz. He had been charged with assaulting my colleagues and burning down one of our jails.

However, it was the death of his mother that linked us for life. I was assigned the task of escorting an inmate to his mother’s funeral only twice in my 15-year career with Manitoba Corrections.

Janz was the first.

The image of him standing handcuffed and shackled at her gravesite is forever etched in my memory. The smell of freshly brewed coffee filled the air while my burly partner and I watched over him from across the room at the brief lunch that followed. Family members hugged him and wiped away his tears.

Outside, he shivered in the cold and took a few last drags on a cigarette next to the big red Manitoba Corrections van. He said ‘sorry’ and ‘goodbye’ to family and friends. The sadness in their eyes was palpable.

He had already made headlines for his involvement in the riot and a lengthy prison term was imminent. We closed the van door with a thud and took him back to jail. It was a long trip.

We stopped at McDonald’s and picked up burgers. I remember him saying it was probably the last Big Mac he would eat in a while. And when we put him back in his cell later that night, he thanked me.

I had done the best I could for him, given the circumstances. That day I didn’t see Janz as the enemy. I saw him as a man who’d just lost his mother. It was the least I could do for him. And her.

That last time I saw him before he was shipped off to the penitentiary, we surely shook hands. And I surely wished him good luck. He was going to need it.

Although we hadn’t spoken since that day, I wasn’t shocked to see his name in my email inbox. We had kept in touch on Facebook over the past few years. He made a recent post about the death of his mother and how regretful he was about being in jail when she had died. He also thanked me in that post and I replied with kind words.

What shocked me, though, was Janz wanted to talk. He wanted to clear the air and his chest about the riot. He wanted to offer both insight and apologies for his involvement. His only condition was he would provide zero information regarding anyone else. This was his story and his alone.

When I asked him why he finally wanted to tell his story after all these years, Janz offered he has been attending church at both Calvary Temple and Christian Life Church in Brandon, where he now lives and works. He has also been sober since 2015. He sees a bright future for the first time in his life.

“I am not telling this story to glorify my past, but to glorify God for the change in my life,” Janz said. His hope is that his story of redemption will bring others hope.

 

The Riot

On the evening of April 25, 1996, following a bloody fight with guards in Headingley’s basement, rioting inmates seized control of the jail.

When order was restored nearly 24 hours later, stories of abhorrent violence emerged. Several officers had been assaulted and narrowly escaped with their lives. Inmates who had been segregated from the jail’s general population — sex offenders and those who had been labelled informants —had been savagely beaten. Fingers had been cut off with crudely made knives, teeth had been pulled and limbs had been broken. It was a miracle no one had been killed.

When the guards were attacked, a set of keys was dropped. That set of keys gave an entire range of 17 inmates — inmates the institution had labeled as predators — unfettered access to the jail’s main building.

Janz was the man who picked those keys up off the floor.

 

The inmate

Janz was adopted at birth in 1972. He was born in Winnipeg and lived in the city until he was three years old. In 1975, the Janz family, with their six children including Drew, moved to Middlebro, a small town near Sprague in southeast Manitoba.

By his own account, Janz’s childhood was both happy and unremarkable. However, his life took a sharp turn when he was about 14. Following a dispute with a group of local teenagers, he took a rifle to their nearby cabin and riddled it with bullets.

Although no one was hit, he was charged with careless use of a firearm and a pattern of rebellion had emerged. By the age of 15, he was living on his own in Winnipeg, couch surfing at the homes of family and friends.

Although he avoided any real time in custody as a youth, Janz admits he was a full-fledged criminal by early adulthood.

Commercial crime became his forte. At 23, he was sentenced to his first serious length of time — 18 months to be served at Milner Ridge Correctional Centre. He’d been convicted of several thefts in which he’d walked into jewelry stores, charmed the clerk into believing he was going to propose to his girlfriend, and simply ran away with diamond rings. 

He was 16 months into that sentence when he got in a fight with another Milner inmate. He was shipped to Headingley where he was housed in the predator unit. He only had two months to go on his sentence the night of the riot.

“They called it the aggressive behaviour control block, so they put all the guys they deemed too violent to be in population in one block,” he said.

“We weren’t treated the same as the rest of the jail. I don’t want anyone’s heart to bleed for me here, but there were a few guards who disrespected us, you know, poking the bear all the time.”

He recalled an incident that angered him and many of his fellow inmates.

“A guy had just got out of the hole after 30 days and a guard kicked over a garbage can and accused the guy of doing it, then the guard told him to clean up the mess. The guy told the guard to clean it up himself. He was thrown back in the hole for another 30 days. That’s how it was back then. If they didn’t like you, they’d make your life miserable.” 

Although there was always tension with staff, Janz said he and his fellow inmates didn’t have a ‘beef’ with the guards on shift that night and that there was a couple of older officers they respected. The fight wasn’t planned. It was a volatile situation that quickly escalated out of control.

The guards had found drugs earlier in the evening and were searching the range for more when they discovered in the shower an inmate who had been assaulted. The other inmates were lined up in a nearby corridor. They had recently signed a contract with a jail manager in which they agreed any future assaults would result in a 90-day lock-up with limited privileges. One guy snapped at the prospect of being locked in his cell for 23 hours a day and started throwing punches. Others soon followed.

Janz says he didn’t strike any officers and remembers helping one of the injured guards to his feet and directing him out of harm. He also vividly remembers picking up those keys. Once the guards had retreated, Janz unlocked every range in the jail, including the protective custody unit where the sex offenders were housed.

The medical unit and adjacent pharmacy were also raided. Before long, a number of his fellow inmates were high as kites. He couldn’t have imagined the horror that unlocking all those doors would create. The violence that ensued still haunts him today.

Janz painted an apocalyptic scene with inmates reading the files of sex offenders out loud and then tying the worst offenders to chairs and kicking them down the stairs. He heard loud sobbing and men begging for their lives.

He claimed to have not participated, but he also did nothing to stop the violence. No one dared to or they would have become targets. He recalled one inmate so badly beaten he was certain the man was dead. Later, Janz and a fellow rioter dragged the motionless con near the main gate. They were shocked to see him crawl toward the awaiting riot squad, leaving a trail of blood.

When the disturbance ended and inmates turned themselves in, Janz managed to convince officials he was not from the block where the riot had started. Initially, he wasn’t charged. It would take months before he was arrested, charged and labeled a ringleader.

His role was exposed when another inmate wrote a lengthy statement against him. That statement resulted in 79 charges laid against Janz, most of which were eventually dropped. Although he was never convicted of assaulting any staff, he was convicted of assault causing bodily harm, based on the inmate’s statement. It’s a charge he stills maintains he’s innocent of. He was also convicted of mischief endangering life.

He went away for four years and came out a hardened convict. Life on the outside was difficult. Although he did have some years of both freedom and normalcy in his life, Janz was in and out of jail periodically until just last year. It was during his last stint in prison that he found God.

“I decided I had two choices. I could do my time, get out and go full bore into a life of crime, or I could change my life,” Janz said. “So I decided to change — not just for my kids, but for me. I started reading the Bible and asking advice from the chaplain, something I’d never done before in jail. On Sept. 21, 2015, I really started believing there was a God and I haven’t looked back since. It is the best decision I ever made in my life. I know I’m not perfect, but I’m taking things one day at a time and it is working for me.”

Looking back, he is able to recognize when his life began to unravel. His father was very strict and — when compounded with the fact he chose not to accept him as his real father — he began to lash out. He was able to make up with his father years later, but he was in jail in Alberta when he died. He also attended that funeral with a prison escort. As well, both his daughters were born while he was in custody.

He’s connected with his birth mother in recent years and just recently learned of the death of his birth father. It was that news that allowed him to be introduced to a whole new family he’d never met, including his paternal grandmother.

What he’s most sorry for in life is the pain he has caused the family he knows. Especially his daughters. All the missed birthdays. The missed holidays. The simple family moments he’s now cherishing.

After all these years, it sounded right to hear Drew Janz finally making amends.

What also sounded right was what he said to me near the end of our interview.

“Sorry about your buddies, too. They were good people and didn’t deserve what happened to them that night,” Janz said over a cup of coffee in Brandon. “They were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

It was at that moment I knew Janz was on the road to redemption.

willy@freepress.mb.ca