A TORTURED BOY SHOWS LOVE ISN’T EASILY DEFEATED
Father’s 15-year sentence upheld in case that reflects triumph of love over despair
There is no guarantee of love in life. Birth, unlike a vacuum, doesn’t come with a warranty. It’s more like a lottery.
Yet love sometimes blooms in the darkest corners.
Sometimes, it doesn’t even start flickering until someone has endured absolute horror in a time absent of love.
Even with two parents with good jobs, and a home that looks great from the outside, there’s still no guarantee of love inside.
I’ve come across some pretty crummy parents down at the Elgin Street courthouse.
You can almost forgive the parents whose hard-drug habits launched their chaos, but then there’s the so-called clean-living parent who stands as a modernday portrait of evil.
Take the monster from the suburbs, the Mountie who starved and tortured his 11-year-old son.
Handcuffed, shackled, beaten and burned. The naked boy slept in chains on the basement floor, next to a slop bucket, while the rest of his family went about their daily routines upstairs.
Myself and former Ottawa Sun writer Tony Spears watched the videos of the Mountie’s disturbing interrogations of his terrified and naked son, bound and chained and begging: “I want my family back.”
His father demanded the boy repent and said he’d weep blood.
I spoke with Tony on the phone hours later, at midnight. It’ll eat you up if you don’t talk about it.
Everyone in that courtroom witnessed an unvarnished strain of pure evil. Justice Robert Maranger said the boy, this young, innocent boy, was nothing in his father’s eyes. The judge said the depths of violence and degradation were beyond comprehension.
It was the only time I’ve seen a defence lawyer cry in court. I had seen cops and jail guards cry in court, but never a defence lawyer. It’s hard not to cry when you see the boy down in the basement.
I don’t watch horror movies, but it was like watching a real-life horror film. I try to make homicide cases a priority, but this case needed to be reported, off and on, for three years because it was worse than homicide.
It was worse because the victim lived to talk about it. That’s what Ontario Superior Court Justice Anne London-Weinstein told me at the time, back when she was the criminal lawyer defending the stepmother who failed the boy.
The 11-year-old boy, who was starving to death, weighed only 50 pounds the day he escaped his Kanata dungeon.
The first time he escaped, the police returned him to the house of his horrors. The second time he escaped, Ottawa police came within seconds of reuniting the boy with his RCMP father before deciding otherwise.
Maranger, the trial judge, said the boy had been robbed of his childhood, and noted the disgraced Mountie did not express remorse.
The boy’s monster was sentenced to prison in April. On Tuesday, Ontario’s top court upheld that 15-year sentence.
The Mountie’s son didn’t attend the hearing in April, but he sent a note that he wrote to his father. Courtroom No. 32 fell silent as love quietly triumphed over despair, from the words of a boy who has endured more hardship than most will in a lifetime.
The boy’s note to his father was read aloud: “You used to always tell me that two plus two equalled four. If you take all of the multiples of four, that still wouldn’t equal all of the people that now care for me and are in my life. If one day you stop thinking about yourself, you may realize how wrong what you did was.”
The boy’s father kept his head down in the prisoner’s box while his son’s note was read.
The detectives who worked the case reported that the boy went on to be surrounded by love and support.
Sometimes love finds a way. I’ve also seen cases that end without love. The worst of these cases, all recent, are about three young men who killed the person they loved the most — their mothers.
Then there are the dads who stand up in court and tell their son’s killer that they murdered the one they loved most. It’s usually over a lousy bag of weed.
The grieving dads usually say they are in a living hell. Always an empty chair at every family occasion, and Christmas is always hard, if they bother to celebrate it. Some families of the slain stopped celebrating anything years ago. They feel too guilty to do anything that feels fun.
For the last bit, I’ve been thinking about love because it’s one of the potent themes in a production I’ve been cast in. It’s a show written and shepherded by Nadia Ross, artistic director of STO Union, a multi-disciplinary performance arts company.
It’s called The Twilight Parade, and it highlights a particular kind of love — the love that comes from simply being here. Nadia says this is a love which, when felt, leads to belonging.
In the show, now running at Arts Court as part of the Undercurrents Festival, there’s an angry white man named Dick. He blames others for his problems.
There’s a moving scene when Dick, a racist, is taken outside in a blizzard, and ordered to look at a human being and to see beyond their anger and confusion and beyond their despair, and to see underneath that there is love.
Says Ross: “That is what we are made of. Simply being has a quality of love in it. Just being alive has this quality. It’s like it just exists, is always there, when everything else is taken away.”
The moment Dick sees love as being what we are made of, his first feeling is remorse: There is so much to apologize for when you have spent a lifetime putting the blame somewhere it doesn’t belong. But that’s where forgiveness can come in.
Dick’s error is common; it is everywhere. That he sees it, apologizes and his apology is witnessed and accepted brings him to feel what has been so lacking in his world: real belonging through being. This kind of love, the love of belonging, is probably at the root of all kinds of love, romantic or otherwise.
Ifonedayyou stop thinking about yourself, you may realize how wrong what you did was.