‘I don’t feel safe’ After the killings of two Métis men, the Star spent a month talking to residents in rural Alberta about racism, crime and roadside run-ins,
Two Métis men went hunting and never came home. After their deaths, the Star spent a month talking to residents in rural Alberta about racism, crime and frightening roadside run-ins
Willie Cardinal blesses a patch of earth and says a prayer in Cree, hoping to free the trapped spirits of his cousin and another man he thought of as a son from the ground where they were shot dead two months ago.
The 70-something Uncle Willie, as his family calls him, is wearing a big black cowboy hat and T-shirt that says “Justice for Jacob & Morris,” as he addresses a small gathering.
It’s taken time to hold this ceremony that’s meant to speed the spirits of two slain Métis hunters on their way, a delay created by the pandemic that’s gripping the world.
But on this warm, windy day in eastern Alberta, about 40 family members of Jacob Sansom, 39, and Maurice “Morris” Cardinal, 57, have gathered at a secluded T-intersection 10 minutes north of the village of Glendon.
Peace officers watch the roads in all directions, there at the request of some family members who expressed trepidation about returning to the area where their loved ones were killed.
The group is largely surrounded by trees. Golden fields that bend in the wind flank the site, along with a smattering of abandoned farmhouses. There’s a small natural gas facility on the corner where Township Road 622 meets Range Road 84, but, aside from that, nothing.
“We cannot give up, my brothers and sisters,” Uncle Willie tells those standing around him, thrusting his fist into the air. “We will fight to the end.”
What really happened on this spot during the night in March when the two men died may remain unknown until the trials take place for Anthony Michael Bilodeau, a 31-year-old local man
“Growing up sucked here. The teachers hated you; you got bullied by everybody. You didn’t have a safe place.” GINA LEVASSEUR JACOB SANSOM’S SISTER
who has pleaded not guilty to seconddegree murder, and his father, Roger Bilodeau, 56, who was charged with second-degree murder last weekend.
The second charge comes more than two months after the younger Bilodeau was charged with second-degree murder in connection with the deaths.
Even with a trial, the real story, and a true motive, might never come out.
What is known is that soon after the story made headlines, the conversation online and in the communities here quickly turned to racism.
Sansom, a volunteer firefighter and father of three, had been laid off from his job as a heavy-duty mechanic due to the COVID-19 pandemic in March. The two men went hunting in the woods near Siebert Lake, according to their family. Later, they went to the sleepy community of Glendon to drop off a moose they’d caught.
That’s where they were killed, their bodies left lying on the ground for nearly seven hours before they were found.
When their deaths became public, some suggested the killings must have been racially motivated. Others said the news wasn’t getting the attention it deserved because of the men’s race. Some cast blame on the two Métis men themselves, saying they must have been stealing or hunting where they shouldn’t have been.
“It was just a matter of time before this unregulated hunting got out of hand,” reads one comment on an Alberta outdoorsmen forum. Within hours, moderators had removed 13 posts, warning of “inflammatory or overtly racist comments.”
The RCMP have said nothing to indicate that racism played a role in the men’s death. But such speculation has not come out of nowhere. In this piece of rural Alberta, perched on the Great Plains not far from the border with Saskatchewan, racism and crime — or at least talk about them — are often intertwined.
Bruce Gladue grew up in the area and returns often to visit with family. He calls it “God’s country,” for its scenery.
But the racism in the area is deeply ingrained, said Gladue, who’s from the Métis Nation of Alberta, and has been serving as an advocate for the victims’ families. “It comes from years of just a general attitude toward Indigenous peoples that you’re a ‘lesser-of’ because you’re Indigenous.”
Residents of Glendon and the nearby town of Bonnyville whom the Star spoke to over the course of a month paint a complex picture.
They speak of deep-running racism against Indigenous people; of run-ins with eerie similarities to what’s believed to have happened to Sansom and Cardinal; and of a rural crime wave that has heightened the tensions.
They also revealed a connection between one of the victims and the man accused of killing him.
Glendon is a village of about 500 people, a farming community, and a blip on the radar surrounded for many miles by farms in rolling hills dotted by old equipment and abandoned buildings. Like much of Alberta, it has been hit hard by the downturn in the oil and gas industry.
Now and then, a tourist pulls off the highway to visit the town’s perogy — a big fibreglass statue, the world’s largest, according to local lore, and a testament to Glendon’s Ukrainian roots.
When they do, they may come across the Korner Mart, run by Ronald Mack, who grew up in Glendon and who describes it as a community dealing with an onslaught of crime since the economy crashed in an oilprice slump.
He tells stories of people having strangers randomly walk into homes while they’re sitting down to a meal, of thefts, home invasions, property damage and assaults on residents. “It gets to the point you don’t know whether you can sleep at night,” he said.
Rural crime has become big news in recent years across Alberta, which since 2017 has suffered the highest rates for break-and-enter incidents and vehicle theft in all of rural Canada. It’s a rate that’s about 40 per cent higher than in urban areas, according to Statistics Canada. Premier Jason Kenney made dealing with it a cornerstone of his government’s mandate, and crime-watch groups have sprung up all over the province. Indigenous community members, meanwhile, have complained of being scapegoated.
Since opening his business in the mid’90s, Mack estimates he’s been robbed about 25 times, and much of that just in the past several years following 2014, coinciding with the economic hardships in the province.
His small shop sits not far from the big village perogy, a short jaunt from Pyrogy Drive. One half of the glass front door is still boarded up from the last time thieves broke in and smashed it. They backed their truck up so they could easily shovel in product before making a quick escape.
These days, Mack says, he packs a shotgun when he moves cartons of cigarettes out at night — taking them out because of how appealing they are to thieves.
He doesn’t agree with it, but Mack can see why some people would resort to vigilantism. “The part that I’m frustrated with, I says, ‘Please guys, you can’t go out there and exasperate your anger on them because it’s going to get out of control.’ ”
Mack brings up the killings and knows the Bilodeau family.
Word on the street has suggested to him that maybe Sansom and Cardinal were out doing “something they weren’t supposed to be doing.” He says the Bilodeau family is “devastated” as well.
“It’s something that should have never happened,” he says.
When it comes to the relationship with Indigenous communities in the area, Mack acknowledges that it can get tense. He says there’s a stigma in the area around Indigenous people and rural crime, but stresses “we also have some white people that are causing the crime, too.”
It’s a potentially toxic situation, and Mack warns that people are nearing the end of their rope. Whether it’s tougher laws or more police officers, he says, something has to be done.
“I see a surge of people starting to say, ‘We’ve had enough. We’re willing to take it into our own hands at any cost,’ ” he says.
“People are angry. They’re mad. They’re ready to step up and say, ‘They get in our way, they won’t be coming back.’ I’ll tell you what, I wouldn’t put it past them to say, ‘Shoot, shovel and shut up.’ ”
Twenty-five minutes down the road is Bonnyville, a flat, rugged town filled with people who once relied on the oil industry. It’s home to parking lot potholes, camouflage ballcaps and big pickup trucks.
Jacob Sansom’s siblings, Michael Sansom, 37, and Gina (Sansom) Levasseur, 35, described it as a hard place for Indigenous kids to grow up, a place with a reputation.
“Growing up sucked here,” Gina says, seated at her brother’s kitchen table in a one-story house where she’s visiting. “The teachers hated you; you got bullied by everybody. You didn’t have a safe place here.”
One of the reasons she moved to Medicine Hat, she says, was to raise her children in a place where there would be less bullying, fighting and racism.
Michael is sitting across from his sister and wearing a T-shirt still dusted with dirt from a trip he made north to his family’s trapline that day.
He remembers people would chase them around when he was younger “by the carload” and beat them up. To this day, he avoids walking around town.
One time, recalls Levasseur, someone even painted a swastika on the side of their house.
“That’s how we grew up tough here,” Michael Sansom says.
Jacob Sansom and Morris Cardinal loved hunting. Cardinal was the kind of person who always knew exactly where the moose would be because he knew
what they would be eating. His family says Sansom learned the hunting traditions of his ancestors and wanted to learn how to speak Cree. He was respectful toward the animals he killed, making sure to use every part of the body.
But Indigenous hunting rights can be an emotional issue in Alberta.
Some white hunters think the system unfairly gives Indigenous people more rights than them. A year ago, when an agreement with the Alberta government was signed saying Métis people had a right to hunt and fish any time of the year in certain areas, others were angered, thinking it causes over-harvesting in animal populations.
Indigenous hunters, like the many in the victims’ family, say it’s a cultural way of life, and that there won’t be an overharvesting problem like some predicted. It can be difficult to afford to buy big chunks of meat at the store, so many of them hunt to provide.
Just before they were killed, Sansom and Cardinal had bagged a moose, which they were entitled to do. It wasn’t unusual for them to distribute meat to family members in need.
So they packed up and drove about two hours to Glendon.
They’d gone to a family member’s house in the area to drop the meat off, because they knew the person needed food, according to relatives.
After they left, they quickly found themselves in a confrontation with people in another vehicle at an unfrequented T-intersection, a stone’s throw from the driveway they had pulled out of.
The run-in started out verbally heated, but turned physical between the two Métis and people in the other vehicle, according to the RCMP. Police allege that Anthony Bilodeau, a Glendon resident with a mechanics background, light brown hair and a beard, then drove up in a third vehicle and shot Sansom and Cardinal.
It happened at about 9:30 p.m. on March 27.
Police say Bilodeau turned himself in after being questioned by police as part of their investigation. Several days after the shooting, on April 1, he was charged with two counts of second-degree murder.
Through his lawyer, Bilodeau declined to comment for this story, as did his family separately.
When charges were laid, the RCMP told the public they didn’t believe Bilodeau knew the two men. But the Star has learned that Sansom and Bilodeau did know each other.
Bilodeau was head mechanic at the DLM Oilfield Enterprises workshop in Bonnyville, says Alberto Nieves, a driver who used to work there around 2014 with Bilodeau. Nieves left just before Sansom was working there as a shophand and remained with the company and still visited the shop from time to time. He remembers seeing Sansom and Bilodeau working there. It was a small operation with maybe 10 people working at once, he said.
Nieves said he was surprised to hear about the charges against Bilodeau.
“It never crossed my mind of Tony doing something like that … I always had good relations with him.”
A spokesperson for the RCMP confirmed that “through the course of the investigation” they’ve learned that the two men knew each other through work. “At the time of the original news release, we had not been able to confirm any association between the victim and the accused.”
When the killings happened, Kyle Lafreniere says he felt a pang of familiarity.
Four months earlier, he had a run-in with a man in a truck about 30 minutes from where Jacob Sansom and Morris Cardinal were shot. It was on a dark, secluded road, too, during a hunting trip with a partner near La Corey, a hamlet in the Municipal District of Bonnyville.
Wearing blaze orange, as an extra precaution, Lafreniere, a Métis man, says he was following all the rules. He was parked at daybreak on a rural road when another truck drove by. It turned around and drove up to his parked truck with the headlights off. It was still dark.
Lafreniere walked up to the old white, single-cab Dodge to ask what the person, who he said was a white man, wanted. The headlights snapped on, making it harder to see.
“I’m getting your plate so I know who to shoot,” came the response. According to the man, he had family living near by and they had been robbed recently.
Lafreniere says he was a little stunned and decided to wish the man well and part ways. The truck drove off.
Lafreniere reported the incident to police the day it happened in late November. But something didn’t feel right about how the police handled his file, and it never went anywhere, not until April, in the wake of the Sansom and Cardinal killings, and after he’d given some media interviews about how he thought racism could have played a role there, too, because he’d experienced something similar nearby.
The police had seen his interviews in the media and got in touch with him. Before that, Lafreniere says, he could barely get them on the phone when he wanted to talk about the death-threat investigation.
They “went into overdrive” and quickly had a potential suspect for the incident in mind, says Lafreniere. But they didn’t have enough to press charges.
A spokesperson for the RCMP acknowledged that the investigation into Lafreniere’s complaint about receiving a death threat on the side of the road “was not initially handled as per our investigative standards.” “Once this was recognized, appropriate action was taken,” the statement reads. “The member who did not follow through with the file was provided operational guidance and corrective administrative measures were taken.”
Tania Badger, who lives in Cold Lake but who is originally from the Kehewin Cree Nation, a reserve near Bonnyville, knows the family of Sansom and Cardinal, and chatted with Jacob Sansom from time to time.
Not long before he was killed, Badger said, she told Sansom about her own run-in with scary people closer to Wolf Lake, farther north than Lafreniere’s incident.
Badger and her 16-year-old daughter were driving home through the countryside one night in late October. They missed a turn and ended up on a road they hadn’t been on before, passing a driveway where some trucks were parked.
One of them tried to pull out and cut Badger and her daughter off.
“We switched driving,” Badger said, “because she was like, ‘Mom, I’m scared, I don’t have a good feeling about this.’ ”
They stopped at an intersection and quickly switched seats without exiting the car. Badger says a truck pulled up on either side of their vehicle and started banging on their windows.
Her daughter kept her window closed, as a man with wide-open, bloodshot eyes banged on his window. There were at least two other people in the truck, she recalls. They seemed intoxicated to Badger, who’d rolled her window down a bit to hear them. Her daughter kept her eyes straight forward. The men began demanding answers from them: “‘What are you doing on the road? Where are you from? Where are you coming from?’
“‘What are you doing on our road’ is what they were saying,” Badger continued.
She decided to leave the situation and drove off. It was like “domestic terrorism,” she said.
Badger didn’t make a complaint to police at the time.
“I just don’t have faith in the Bonnyville RCMP, to be honest.”
It wasn’t until she heard of Sansom and Cardinal being killed that she decided her incident may be related and reported it.
“It’s a sad fact for us, but I mean, I’ve made complaints before and nothing was done,” she said.
The RCMP said Badger’s information “remains part of the ongoing homicide investigation” and they do “not condone anyone forcing someone to pull over, or stop.”
The spokesperson said Badger and Lafreniere’s instances are the only two the RCMP know of where people were confronted by men on the road like that.
By all accounts, Jacob Sansom was a force of nature and a sponge for knowledge.
He would train in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, even if he had been up all night on a call as a volunteer firefighter. He was the kind of person who would read a chemistry textbook just for fun. He also liked making videos. Sansom squats down in front of the camera, wearing a mask that makes his breathing sound like Darth Vader, with a firefighter’s oxygen tank strapped to his back. He’s about to start flipping a tire, twice as thick as he is, down the street.
This is Sansom’s Facebook page, called “The motivational predator.” It’s filled with videos the 39-year-old made. The clip with the oxygen tank is titled “training like a beast today.”
He’s a big guy — tall, with dark, short hair, and black tribal tattoos running down his left arm. He had bright eyes and an expressive brow.
Fitness features prominently on the page, through which he speaks about working out as one potential treatment for some of humanity’s maladies, such as using drugs or suicidal thoughts.
To his family, this is typical Jacob Sansom; energetically trying to lift people who may be struggling in life, motivating them to be better. When he wasn’t doing this kind of stuff, his happy place was out in the woods hunting with his uncle.
“You always hear about it,” says Levasseur, his sister. “It sounds so cliché, but it’s like, why is it the good people? Why is it the people that have so much to offer the world?”
One day, three years before he died, the subject of racism had been on Sansom’s mind.
“What’s going on in this world?” he says in a 2017 video on his Facebook page.
“Today’s the day,” he goes on, pacing back and forth near a kitchen, “that you start to understand you guys are not gonna evolve if you’re still gonna be prejudiced and racist like this. It’s pretty sad.
“We should be part of each other. We should be living in this world together, not separate.”
“You guys are not gonna evolve if you’re still gonna be prejudiced and racist like this. It’s pretty sad.”
JACOB SAMSON ON FACEBOOK VIDEO