Brian Smith killer’s fate lonely death in Ottawa
Jeffrey Arenburg, who fatally shot CJOH sportscaster Brian Smith in the station’s Merivale Road parking lot 22 years ago, is dead.
Arenburg died in Ottawa on June 13 of an apparent heart attack, according to his brother, Allen Arenburg. He was 60.
“There’s never an end, but it’s closure of sorts,” Smith’s widow, Alana Kainz, said Monday.
“I’m at peace. Now he’s at peace. He was suffering too,” Kainz said. “I’m going to continue to remember Brian as this wonderful man who was generous to his community, generous to his family. The chapter that’s closed is that fear, that worry.”
Brian Smith, 54, was fatally shot on Aug. 1, 1995 as he left the CJOH studio. Arenburg, whose paranoid schizophrenia was untreated and who had been hearing voices in his head, was waiting in the parking lot with a .22-calibre rifle.
He shot Smith in the forehead simply because he had recognized his face from television. Smith died in hospital the next day.
“He happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Arenburg said by way of explanation in a 2014 interview with CBC’s The Fifth Estate.
Arenburg surrendered to police the next day and was eventually found not criminally responsible for the killing. He was granted an unconditional discharge from a psychiatric facility in 2006, having taken his medication faithfully and not having had any recurrence of psychotic episodes. But a year later, he was in trouble again for punching a U.S. border guard at the Peace Bridge crossing in Buffalo. He had stopped taking his medication.
Arenburg represented himself at the trial in a performance that his court-appointed adviser described as “an excursion into the mind of Mr. Arenburg, a mind that is ill and in need of medical assistance.”
Arenburg spent a year in a U.S. jail before being released and deported back to Canada.
He was living in Nova Scotia, his home province, when he was interviewed by The Fifth Estate for a story on “not criminally responsible” cases.
“OK, I shot Brian Smith,” Arenburg told the interviewer before adding he has “a right to have a life without everybody being told what to think.”
Asked what he would say to the widow Kainz if he could, Arenburg responded: “What could I say? I can’t change yesterday. It don’t matter. If I bawl my eyes out to the end of the world, I can’t change what happened yesterday or 18 years ago or 20 years ago. Don’t matter what I do.”
Arenburg returned to Ottawa in 2014 after The Fifth Estate program aired and lived for a period at the Ottawa Mission. At the time, Kainz was living just a few blocks away on Rideau Street and would regularly walk her dog past the mission. She moved just before Arenburg arrived.
“I’m just thankful that the Ottawa Mission took him in and offered him support so that he did not hurt others at the end,” Kainz said. “That was always my concern — that he wasn’t well enough to be in society as a safe person.”
Arenburg was living in an apartment on Laurier Avenue West at the time of his death. His brother, Allen, said the family had had little contact with Jeffrey in recent years. Allen, himself, hadn’t talked to him in seven years. Allen said police called him to say Jeffrey had died.
“He was kind of a loner,” Allen said in a brief phone interview from Barrie. He did not know anything about his brother’s funeral arrangements.
Meanwhile, Kainz said her life has moved on from the tragedy. She and Smith, a former left winger who played 13 years in the National Hockey League, had been married two years but together as a couple for nine. Smith was a devoted philanthropist — he was on his way to a Children’s Wish Foundation fundraiser when he was killed — and the Boys and Girls Club of Ottawa’s summer camp renamed its summer leadership camp in his honour. The “Camp Smitty” charity golf classic, now in its 22nd year, takes place July 18 and has raised $2 million for the club.
“At some point I didn’t want him (Arenburg) to rent space in my head,” Kainz said. “I wanted my thoughts to be about Brian and memories of Brian and not living in fear because someone was mentally ill.
“I think of Brian every day — sometimes every hour. And I’d think about Arenburg maybe once every six months. Now I don’t have to think about that at all.”
Though Arenburg’s presence didn’t make her feel unsafe, she knew he might be off his medication and worried he might again target someone in the media.
Years before killing Smith, Arenburg had punched the manager of a Nova Scotia radio station, complaining the station had been broadcasting messages directly into his brain. It was that same delusion that brought him to the CJOH parking lot that August afternoon.
I’m just thankful that the Ottawa Mission took him in so that he did not hurt others at the end.
“I did worry about ‘breaking news’ — you know, someone else,” Kainz said. “Now, that’s not going to happen.”