Stabbing victim’s mom wants to see metal detectors at Kelvin High School

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This article was published 26/08/2015 (4053 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The mother of a slain teen is speaking out about school safety for the first time since her son was stabbed near Kelvin High School on June 2.

With another school year fast approaching, Jamie Bourne, the mother of 17-year-old Brett Bourne, wants to prevent further violence from happening in schools.

No one else should have to live without their child, she said.

“I’m still in shock, I miss him dearly. I am very surprised that his life ended on a schoolyard – or it ended in a hospital — but that that stabbing took place in a schoolyard,” Bourne said. “I’m slowly learning to live moments without him and try to get through days without crying.”

Bourne spoke at a private home near the southern perimeter where one of her relatives lives, and brought a childhood friend for emotional support.

It’s close to where Brett used to go quadding with his cousins as a boy and where the family celebrated his wake after his funeral on June 9. They sent lit Chinese lanterns into the sky in his memory, carrying messages and well wishes up to Brett, his mother said.

Bourne kept her sunglasses on during an interview, removing them now and again to wipe tears from her eyes.

She said she hasn’t felt well enough to return to work, but wanted to feel productive so she started a petition on Change.org earlier this summer. The petition aims to get metal detectors installed at the gates of Winnipeg high schools to prevent weapons from getting onto schoolgrounds. As of Wednesday evening, it had 425 supporters.

“I know this won’t change overnight, but I don’t ever want to hear of another child being stabbed or shot on the schoolground, in the school, next to the school, whatever those people want to determine,” Bourne said.

As she leafed through a notebook where she’s compiled statistics on school violence, the mother said the idea for metal detectors around schools’ perimeters wasn’t a kneejerk reaction to her son’s death.

Bourne had been speaking with the administration at Kelvin about violence, drugs and gangs in the school since 2012 when her son was a student, she said.

“I started this before my son was (killed). We spoke honestly about the culture within (Kelvin High School) and it literally fell on deaf ears,” Bourne said.

Brett Bourne attended Kelvin in Grades 9 and 10, but left in 2014 when his mother and he mutually decided he would work full time and finish school later.

“He struggled with his education. He didn’t have the intelligence or the problem-solving skills, maybe, to become an A student, a B student or a C (student) maybe,” Bourne said.

The mother said she and her son had an honest relationship and he told her when things were going wrong at school.

“I would always tell my son, ‘If you don’t tell me the truth, I can’t help you. If you tell me the truth, I can help you.’ So he was very transparent,” she said. “Now I fought my hardest, I reached out, tried to get help. Because my son was a boy, right? He was a boy going through the end of his first love.”

Brett was stabbed near the intersection of Stafford Avenue and Kingsway after a fight involving two other teenagers, Winnipeg police have said.

The fight was allegedly over a girl, Bourne’s friends told the Free Press.

Jamie Bourne said there are many details, like this one, she can’t confirm while the case is before the courts.

A 17-year-old Kelvin student was arrested and charged with second-degree murder in connection to the case. He is being held in custody and has a bail hearing in September.

 

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Bourne said her son was enjoying a day off from his new job working at a home renovations company on the day he died.

He was riding his bicycle on the way to the Cabela’s store when he stopped in at his old school and got into the fatal fight, she said. Bourne couldn’t say why he stopped at Kelvin.

The school went into a lockdown mode during the incident and no one else was hurt.

Teaching and administrative staff were praised by the Winnipeg School Division for their swift reactions, but Bourne thinks they shouldn’t have been responsible for taking the reins during such a scenario.

“Teachers don’t have time to police and teachers should not be policing. Teachers should be educating and being role models, but they should not have to be policing,” she said.

There are a limited number of school resource officers from the Winnipeg Police Service who patrol multiple schools at a time. It’s not clear where Kelvin’s resource officer was on the day of the stabbing. Investigations by the WPS and an internal investigation at Kelvin are still ongoing.

Bourne thinks a metal detector could have prevented her son’s death.

“Had there been a detector and they could not have entered any other way, that knife would not have killed my son,” she said.

Bourne said she’d like to see one or two metal detectors at secure entrances around Kelvin and in other high schools.

She acknowledged not every high school may need metal detectors — “I can only speak to Kelvin moreso because that’s where my experience is,” she said — and that the devices may not prevent all weapons from getting onto schoolgrounds.

But the security practice, which is common in the United States, could prevent future tragedies, Bourne said.

She sees her son’s generation as “very violent” and their bullying — both online and in person — as becoming progressively worse.

The mother said she begged teachers not to give her son passing grades when he reached high school age because she thought he wasn’t ready for the workload yet.

When Brett got to Kelvin, he wasn’t able to keep up with classes and was teased, in some instances for not wearing trendy brand name clothing, Bourne said.

The family couldn’t afford much luxury, but like any teenager, Brett wanted desperately to fit in, his mother said.

“As much self-confidence as you’d try to instil, their biggest critics are their peers and that’s who they really want their approval from,” she said through tears. “I worked hard to raise my children on my own. I had two boys, that’s what I had — I used to have.”

jessica.botelho-urbanski@freepress.mb.ca