Mother wants to know why her son died in car chase
Agatha Eaglechief is SASKATOON never far from her son.
She visits the spot where Austin Eaglechief died — a gentle slope covered in parched grass between a busy freeway and an empty-looking industrial building — as often as she can.
Now, a little more than a year after his death, the bent steel and broken glass have long since been cleared away. All that remains is a wooden cross adorned with beads and flowers, and a forlorn pinwheel, spinning under the gunmetal sky.
“I drive by here, I stop, we sit here. We eat with him. We smoke with him. We drink with him. If I could, I’d pitch up my teepee right here. He’s beside us. I know it,” she said, the sunglasses hiding tears.
Austin died a few minutes after 9 p.m. on June 19, 2017, when the stolen truck he was driving at speeds up to 150 km/h smashed into another pickup at the intersection of Airport Drive and Circle Drive.
The pursuit began moments earlier when Saskatoon police officers attempted to stop the black truck in River Heights. One officer fired two rounds at the vehicle, missing both times, after it rammed a police cruiser and fled.
A forensic autopsy found gunshot wounds did not cause or contribute to the 22-year-old’s death; he died from “blunt force trauma secondary to a high speed collision,” police said one week after the crash.
“It certainly could have been much worse,” then-police chief Clive Weighill told reporters, noting an outside police agency would investigate.
Agatha is still waiting for answers about what happened the night her son — who was trapped in a cycle of drugs and gangs he couldn’t escape — shouted goodbye and walked out her door for the last time.
Some of those answers are likely to come out during an upcoming judicial inquiry during which a sixmember jury will determine how Austin died and make recommendations to prevent similar deaths.
Agatha knows it will be hard, sitting in a sterile room and listening to a procession of witnesses discuss the moments leading up to her son’s death and its aftermath in excruciating detail. But she’s ready for it.
“I’m going in strong, and I’m going in bull-headed, and I’m going to make sure and stand firm,” she said. “My son died for a reason. He was shot at, basically, and for what? He just woke up an hour before he died.”
Saskatoon police’s Julie Clark confirmed in an email that members of Austin Eaglechief ’s family met with police representatives, but declined to answer specific questions about the pursuit.
That information, Clark said in an email, “will be revealed in the pending inquest.”
Last month, Saskatoon police blamed a 40 per cent spike in “evade police” incidents last year on methamphetamine, while at the same time expressing hope the sharp spike was an anomaly.
As Agatha braces for the inquest — it is not clear when it will be held — she is also working to better herself by signing up for university courses and raising awareness about mental health and addictions.
It’s something she experienced firsthand, growing up as the daughter of residential school survivors on the Mosquito First Nation and raising six children while struggling through poverty,
And it’s something, she said, Austin understood when he wrote a letter to the editor, which The StarPhoenix published in 2012, calling himself an “angry Aboriginal youth” and urging First Nations people to fight for change.
“I’m basically getting my life in order and making sure that people see there can be change … I did a lot of thinking, and basically I’m here to tell people that there’s a different life after you lose somebody,” Agatha said.