Thunder Bay court delivers surprise bit of justice

Opinion

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This article was published 14/12/2020 (1765 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was an all-too-familiar story, with an expected ending.

In the early hours of Jan. 29, 2017, Barbara Kentner and her sister were walking to her nephew’s home in a Thunder Bay neighbourhood when a vehicle pulled up alongside.

In it was 18-year-old Brayden Bushby, who had been drinking all day. As his friend would later testify, Bushby wanted to “drive around and yell at hookers.”

From the moving vehicle, Bushby picked up a trailer hitch and flung it at women, striking Kentner in the abdomen.

“I felt something hard hit me,” Kentner later told police. “I couldn’t breathe and I fell to my knees. I looked at the car and seen some guy put his head out the window and said, ‘Yeah, I got one.’”

The vehicle sped away.

Kentner suffered all night, and asked her sister to take her to the hospital. Hours later, she underwent surgery for a perforated bowel.

Police charged Bushby with aggravated assault. Later, after a plea deal, he admitted throwing the hitch.

The ordeal was hardly over for Kentner. Over the next six months, she was in and out of hospital, suffering from infections, damaged internal organs, and pneumonia, before dying July 4, 2017, at the age of 34.

She was a mother. A sister. An Anishinaabe woman from Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation. A human being.

Indigenous peoples are often harassed, assaulted, and attacked in Thunder Bay, Ont.

“It happened to me growing up,” Kentner’s childhood friend Deanne Hupfield explained to media, saying she and others have experienced racist and sexist comments alongside beer cans, bottles and trash thrown at them.

“It happened to my mom, my sisters and my friends.”

It’s more than harassment though. Indigenous peoples — and in particular, women and youth — are killed in Thunder Bay.

Seven First Nations high school students — Jethro Anderson, 15, Curran Strang, 18, Robyn Harper, 19, Paul Panacheese, 21, Reggie Bushie, 15, Kyle Morrisseau, 17 and Jordan Wabasse,15 — who had moved to the city were found dead in it between 2000 and 2011.

Stacy DeBungee, a 41-year-old Ojibway man, was found dead in the McIntyre River in 2015.

Police classified these deaths as “accidental,” unsolvable, not suspicious, and not worth pursuing.

It took decades of activism and attention to demand change. Some have come in books, such as Tanya Talaga’s Seven Fallen Feathers; others are more official, such the 2016 inquest into the seven student deaths, resulting in 145 recommendations for changes in policing, the justice system, and the education system in Thunder Bay.

Another was the 2018 investigation into the Thunder Bay Police Services Board, headed by Sen. Murray Sinclair (my father).

In it, Sinclair found: “The Indigenous population of Thunder Bay experiences racism, both overt and systemic, on a daily basis. High-profile cases of murder and violence are only the tip of the iceberg; every Indigenous interviewee had a personal story, ranging from inferior service, verbal insults, and racial profiling to physical assaults, threats of violence, and, in many cases, the death by violence of friends or family members.”

While these books, reports, and demands for change have offered countless recommendations for change in Thunder Bay, much has not.

So, what was expected Monday afternoon, in a Thunder Bay courtroom, was the same old racism, same old coverups, and same-old systemic denial of Indigenous deaths.

A not-guilty verdict, and a statement Indigenous lives — and in particular, women — don’t matter: Colten Boushie, Tina Fontaine, Cindy Gladue…

What we got, instead, was justice.

“I find Brayden Bushby guilty as charged of the offence of manslaughter,” Justice Helen Pierce told the court.

Bushby’s defence tried to argue Kentner’s failure to go to the hospital right away, her pre-existing medical conditions, and even her past life choices had as much to do with her death as Bushby throwing a trailer hitch at her.

Indigenous peoples earn their deaths, the defence tried to say. It’s an argument that has worked in the past.

Pierce, though, decided to look at the facts.

“I find that the Crown has proven beyond a reasonable doubt that Mr. Bushby’s dangerous and unlawful act accelerated and caused Ms. Kentner’s death,” she pronounced.

The defence also tried to argue the act wasn’t racially motivated.

On this, Pierce said little — which perhaps said the most.

Change can’t all come in one day. On Monday, though, we got a moment of hope. Of change, of justice.

Maybe a little bit of peace for Barbara Kentner’s family, too.

niigaan.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca