The Karl Staats story
A Six Nations man was killed in the prime of his life after his car wouldn’t start one cold night in 1983. Thirty-five years later, some wonder if anything has changed following the death of Jonathan Styres and acquittal of the man who shot him.
Shot dead asking for help
ONE COLD NIGHT IN 1983, a young Six Nations man with car trouble knocked on a door in Flamborough asking for help.
Instead, Karl Staats ended up with a .22-calibre rifle blast to the face. The 20year-old college student and son of the elected chief was dead.
“All he wanted to do was use the phone,” friend Terri Monture recalls 35 years later. “I just could not see Karl getting into a situation.”
Monture had known Staats since Grade 7 and by Grade 13 had become close friends with the slight, peaceful, musicloving loner.
The two Mohawk kids managed to stay in touch when they left Ohsweken to study, she to York University and he to Fanshawe College in London, Ont.
“The good memories in that time of my life kind of override that horrible, tragic period,” says Monture, who now lives in Toronto.
But the brutal, abrupt end of her friend’s life and how the man who shot him walked after two-and-a-half years has renewed significance these days.
The death of Colten Boushie, a 22-yearold Cree man, in Saskatchewan, and a jury’s acquittal in February of the farmer who shot him was an ugly, if not exact, echo of the Staats case.
Then, in June, a Hamilton jury found a Glanbrook man, Peter Khill, not guilty of second-degree murder and manslaughter in the shooting death of Jonathan Styres, a 29-year-old from Six Nations.
Monture also cites Tina Fontaine, 15, in Winnipeg, and Cindy Gladue, 36, in Edmonton, whose accused killers were also acquitted.
The spate of not-guilty verdicts was too much to handle, says Monture, who spoke during a rally at Queen’s Park on July 1 in the shadow of Canada Day celebrants.
“Until we have true justice for our sons and daughters, there is never going to be a reconciliation with this settler nations,” she told a group of about 200, which included Styres’ loved ones and Six Nations elected Chief Ava Hill.
The rally and official calls by First Nations leaders to overhaul a justice system seen to be failing Indigenous people is putting increased pressure on provincial and federal legislators.
Just last week, Styres’ grieving relatives met with the Boushie, Gladue and Fontaine families, and addressed the Assembly of First Nations in Vancouver about the issue.
“There’s definitely a pattern that’s happening in cases like this across Canada,” Ontario Regional Chief RoseAnne Archibald told The Spectator in a recent interview.
Archibald said systemic racism and few Indigenous jurors are core problems in the justice system that must be addressed. The Peter Khill verdict drove that home again, she said.
“There’s a real sense of exasperation, like ‘Oh no, it happened again. Why is this event replaying itself, over and over.’ There’s a real sense of anger about it, righteous anger, I would call it.”
One Queen’s Park protester called the Khill verdict “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”
Peter Khill, then 26, fired his shotgun twice at Styres when he found him rummaging through his truck at 3 a.m. in the driveway of his Glanbrook home in February 2016.
During the 12-day trial, Khill, who is white, said he thought Styres was going to shoot him. It turned out he didn’t have a gun.
There’s outrage over the acquittals. Meanwhile, another problem is the disproportionate number of First Nations people incarcerated in Canada.
A Statistics Canada report showed Indigenous youth represented 46 per cent of admissions to correctional services in 2016-17 while accounting for only eight per cent of the youth population.
Advocates for changes point to the intergenerational trauma inflicted by residential schools, the Sixties Scoop, loss of youngsters to the child welfare system, and poverty as some of the underlying causes of the lopsided figures.
Indeed, the solutions go beyond tweaks to the justice system, Monture says, noting as an example how a “marauding Indians” stereotype alone makes Indigenous people more vulnerable.
She worries her son, a hulking 25-yearold who plays rugby, could be “coded” in such a fashion should his car break down in a rural area.
“The idea ... is just kind of terrifying to me,” said Monture, who’s a staff representative with the Canadian Media Guild and writer.
In 1983 — when residential schools were still operating and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission decades away — Monture said she couldn’t fathom how Karl Staats could have posed a threat to the man who shot him.
“I could never see him being in a situation where he would endanger himself like that ... Like, it didn’t compute.”
Born in 1962, Staats was the son of Wellington, a longtime elected chief, and Gwen Staats in Ohsweken.
The young man was in his second year at Fanshawe studying sound engineering when he returned home for a visit in late March 1983.
That weekend, he spent most of his time writing and playing music, his father, who died in 2014, recalled at trial.
“He was so popular, but he spent so much time with music, he didn’t have many friends. But anyone who knew him, liked him.”
Karl and his friend, Lorne Greene, were driving back to Six Nations after watching a double-feature at the Waterdown drivein the night he was shot.
They’d been sharing a bottle of booze and pulled over in the laneway of a farmhouse on Brock Road in Flamborough to urinate shortly after midnight, court heard.
But then Staats’ black Pontiac Trans Am wouldn’t start, so he told his friend he’d ask for help, taking a five-dollar bill with him to offer the resident for his trouble.
His father shared with court what he told his son to do if he ever had car trouble.
“Your neighbours are all your helpers in the country and we told him that rather than stop a car, he should go to a farmhouse for help.”
But the chief added, “We told him he should expect nothing for nothing — he