NAIL GUN SHOOTING MOTIVATED BY RACISM, SAYS MOTHER
Trenton man charged with criminal negligence causing bodily harm after construction site incident
Stacey Dlamini wants an apology.
Last month, her 21-year-old son, Nhlanhla, who is originally from South Africa, was shot in the side with a nail gun on a job site in Abercrombie and as a result, suffered a collapsed lung.
But when confronted about the seriousness of the incident, she says her son’s injuries were downplayed by the company he worked for as only a minor injury that required a Band-Aid fix.
In reality, it was far more serious.
“The doctor said my son could have lost his life,” Stacey said.
On Sept. 19, Stacey, who is executive director of a youth homeless shelter in Pictou County, Roots for Youth, was getting out of a board meeting in New Glasgow when she turned on her phone and was suddenly inundated with notifications of missed calls from a number she wasn’t familiar with.
She called it back and discovered it was a friend of her son Nhlanhla.
“Your son has been shot with a nail gun,” the friend told her.
She rushed over to the Aberdeen Hospital and found him on a hospital bed being prepped for surgery for a partially collapsed lung. The three-and-a-half-inch nail he had been shot with had punctured it.
On a couple of occasions that night her son burst into tears.
“Why would anybody do this?” he asked at one point.
At first, all Stacey could focus on was his health and whether or not he was going to be OK.
“When he stabilized and told me what had happened, that’s when I got angry,” she said.
Nhlanhla, who is black, told her how in the three weeks he had been working for PQ Properties, he had been called “Squigger.” It wasn’t until a friend pointed it out to him that he noticed how close it is to the N word. He also had many pranks pulled on him, including having his coat stapled to a project they were working on.
“I think one of the issues is to do with a culture of unsafe working practices in which pranking was tacitly accepted,” Stacey said.
But she also believes based on what her son has told her, the incident was also racially motivated.
“The reality is that Nhlanhla was the only black person on the crew,” she said, adding that although there was another person hired around the same time, her son was the only one picked on.
On the day of the alleged incident, Nhlanhla has said a coworker told him he was moving too slow and pointed a nail gun at him.
“This guy aimed at my son,” Stacey alleges. “He waited until they locked eyes and until he turned and ran before he shot.”
Shawn Wade Hynes, 43, of Trenton, has been charged with one count of criminal negligence causing bodily harm in the incident.
Police have said they do not have evidence to indicate that the incident was racially motivated.
While she wonders why the charge wasn’t assault or assault with a weapon, rather than criminal negligence, Stacey said she is grateful the police took action.
“What I hope is that the police pressed a charge that is most likely to result in a conviction,” she said.
Since news of the incident became public, Stacey said the response from the community has been completely overwhelming.
“We’re grateful for it,” she said. “We’ve been contacted by friends and acquaintances and complete strangers from this community, from across the province and from across the country. A lot of people have reached out to us and offered their empathy and support.”
She hopes if there’s good that can come out of a bad situation like this it’s that there will continue to be discussion around the issue of racism.
“These incidents can and do still happen. What I hope is that through this experience, conversations will be sparked, that people will take an honest look at themselves and the ways in which we may or may not contribute to an environment where racism is allowed to persist in the stories we tell, in the way we refer to people and the jokes we make.”