A TRAGEDY REMEMBERED
One year after a triple murder-suicide along Highway 2, family and friends of the victims work to rebuild shattered lives
RANDY STEPPLE, FATHER OF SHOOTING VICTIM TABITHA STEPPLE
Randy Stepple shuffles around his bungalow, still wearing his scrubs after a shift as a registered nurse at Lethbridge’s Chinook Hospital, as he shows off the many pictures of his daughter Tabitha that fill every corner of his living room.
“Here she is at probably two and a half. There she is at the giant beanstalk. That’s her on a ski hill,” he said, his hands full of photos and his voice softening at the memories.
“She was that far from perfect,” he added, holding his fingers just millimetres apart.
These days, all he has left are photos, keepsakes and memories of his beautiful daughter.
On Dec. 15, 2011, Tabitha Stepple, 21, was slain in a horrific shooting along Highway 2 north of Claresholm by her ex-boyfriend Derek Jensen, 21.
The gunman also sprayed bullets at baseball players Mitch MacLean, 20, Tanner Craswell, 22, and Craswell’s girlfriend Shayna Conway, 21, before turning the gun on himself. Only Conway survived.
The case grabbed nationwide headlines and triggered one of the biggest police investigations that some veteran officers had ever been a part of.
A year later, the victims’ families and friends are making efforts to return to the life they once knew.
After funeral arrangements, memorial services, and months of missed work days and classes, they’re busy caring for their other children, their pets, and spending time with friends.
Everyone is managing in their own ways.
But their grief is still strong, their pain palpable, evident by every whimper and sniffle, every pause it takes for them to catch their breath as they recall the memories of that day and the emptiness they still feel.
“There will always be something missing,” said Dianne MacLean, Mitch’s mother. “I know I’m healing. But it changes who we are. We will never be the same.”
Many questions still remain unanswered about how a person — described by friends as a loyal friend and paramedic-in-training — could snap and snuff out four lives, including his own, and leave a fifth person with permanent wounds.
“If Derek came straight out and said he was going to do that, we wouldn’t have believed it,” Stepple’s father said.
Jensen grew up in Lethbridge in a large, tight-knit Mormon family. He was an avid outdoorsman and loved to hunt.
Stepple was goofy, animated, and fun-loving, recalled her father. Dancing was a lifelong passion and family trips to the mountains fostered her love for snowboarding. She took a few classes at the local college, but put her studies on hold to sort out her future, said best friend Cait McFarland.
“She was going to be an ultrasound technician one day, a dental hygienist the next day, and leader of the free world,” said McFarland, laughing.
The friends met while working together at Montana’s Cookhouse, and quickly became inseparable, after discovering their mutual love of dancing, sleeping in and spontaneous road trips.
Stepple met Jensen at a nightclub on Boxing Day 2010, and the two started dating shortly after, eventually moving in together. He was the perfect gentleman, charming, handsome and polite in the beginning, McFarland recalled.
But soon Stepple started to notice a dark side of Jensen emerge, one that would keep tabs on her and hurl insults at her in front of her friends. One day, during a heated argument, he pushed her. It was the final straw for Stepple, who ordered him out of her life.
He planned to move out of their shared basement suite and head to Edmonton to fin-
If Derek came straight out and said he was going to do that, we wouldn’t have believed it
ish his EMT training. But those plans would change after an unexpected encounter at the Blarney Stone pub.
That night, friends gathered at the bar for Tanner Craswell’s 22nd birthday. A rising star in the baseball community, Craswell was known for his love of pasta and joking around. He and his best friend Mitch MacLean had moved across the country to play with the Lethbridge Bulls, a summer collegiate team, and the Prairie Baseball Academy, a developmental baseball school that attracts top players nationwide.
Craswell, who played shortstop, and MacLean, a second baseman, were considered critical parts of the team, said Bulls president and general manager Kevin Kvame, who treated the boys like his own sons. He said they shone off the field as well, attracting friends with their fun-loving personalities.
Baseball was MacLean’s passion since he was a young boy, recalled his mother Dianne, adding he and his younger brother would imitate their oldest brother at his games.
He was a shy, sentimental boy growing up, but being in Lethbridge seemed to help him discover himself; it’s where he blossomed and “became Mitch,” she said.
Also among the partiers was Shayna Conway, who had moved from the Maritimes to Alberta to be closer to Craswell, her on-again, off-again boyfriend. She had invited her Montana’s co-workers and good friends Stepple and McFarland to the party.
The boys had a flight to catch the next morning to go home to Prince Edward Island for Christmas. Kvame had offered to give them a ride, but — caught up in the birthday fun — they told him they were going to make their own way to Calgary International Airport.
Stepple quickly stepped in and offered the use of her vehicle.
“It would have been a little adventure to go on,” her father Randy said. “She made miscellaneous trips. It wasn’t out of the norm for Tabitha.”
Meanwhile, Jensen and his friends were at the Shark Club to see him off before his departure to Edmonton. He seemed calm and happy, his friends said. They later moved the festivities to the Blarney Stone. That’s when Jensen saw Stepple.
Words were exchanged, and as he became visibly angrier, he pushed her out of her seat.
His friends said Jensen may have been shocked to see her hanging out with guys he didn’t recognize, when he was under the impression she was supposed to be driving a friend to Calgary to catch a plane that night. They denied ever seeing an abusive side of him.
After Stepple left the bar that night, Jensen tried to phone her multiple times. When she finally answered, he told her: “I hope you know, this night’s not going to end well for you.” Then he hung up.
Following his run-in with Stepple, Jensen went back to the Shark Club with his friends. But it wasn’t long before he told them abruptly that he had to leave. It was the last time they would see him alive.
By the end of the night, Conway, Craswell and MacLean had piled into Stepple’s Ford Escape and were on their way to Calgary.
McFarland had been invited along for the ride, but a laundry hamper took up too much space in the vehicle and she opted not to go.
The RCMP would later reveal in a detailed account that the foursome had stopped at the 7-Eleven in Claresholm for a break where, unbeknownst to them, Jensen had caught up to them in his Pontiac Sunfire.
Once the vehicles were back on the road, Jensen ran the group’s SUV off the highway north of Claresholm, prompting Conway — who was driving — to emerge from the vehicle.
Jensen then aimed his Heckler & Koch 9-mm handgun and shot her several times, sending her crumpling to the ground.
He also pumped bullets into the SUV, killing Craswell and Stepple where they sat. MacLean was discovered wounded outside the vehicle, but he died en route to hospital.
Jensen then took his own life.
Police would later find two more weapons in Jensen’s car — a loaded 12-gauge shotgun and a loaded Winchester rifle. All three firearms were registered to him.
Dianne MacLean said she firmly believes her son approached Jensen to try to save his friends.
“Shayna heard (Mitch) say to Derek, ‘What the hell are you doing?’ ” she said, adding her son was shot in the stomach, which indicated he was facing the gunman.
“That’s just me thinking that (Mitch) diverted his attention and Shayna was still alive and Derek forgot that or didn’t know she was still alive.”
Friends and family said Conway was conscious throughout the whole ordeal and desperately tried calling 911 while lying on the ground.
Eventually a passerby saw the scene, stopped, and contacted police.
Sgt. Terry Wickett, commander of the Claresholm RCMP detachment, remembers receiving the call that roused him from sleep. It was just after 3 a.m. and a constable, who was finishing up his shift, needed assistance with a shooting incident.
In terms of lives lost, it was the one of the biggest cases Wickett — a 31-year veteran of the RCMP — had ever been faced with.
“It was very tragic, very horrific,” he said.
The investigation was so massive it pulled RCMP members from High River, Fort Macleod and Vulcan to the scene. RCMP major crimes investigators took the lead on the case, examining evidence and piecing together the chain of events. Collision specialists were also dispatched from Calgary and Lethbridge.
A long stretch of highway was closed for half a day, during which time rumours started spreading about the crime, some surmising the grisly scene was a result of a drug deal gone sideways. Soon, as bits and pieces of the case were released, the news reached Lethbridge and P.E.I.
Randy Stepple was at work when he was summoned to his director’s office and came face to face with victims services and the police, who delivered the gut-wrenching news. He then had the excruciating task of notifying the rest of his family.
“You go into funeral mode, believe it or not. You don’t have an option. You kind of have to keep it together,” he said.
Dianne MacLean was also at the office, joking around over the lunch hour with colleagues, when her husband called her — the solemnity in his voice signalling something was wrong.
“All he said was, ‘Mitch is gone.’ ”
McFarland remembers doing the laundry when breaking news updates on TV caught her attention. As more and more information came to light with every new report, she soon learned it was her friends who had been killed.
“I was thinking, my world is over,” she said, fighting tears.
Scars — both physical and emotional — remain 12 months later.
Anger still boils up in Randy when he speaks of the man who robbed his daughter of her life. He bristles at the suggestion that this was an act of domestic violence, adding there were many other factors at play.
“This goes way beyond domestic abuse. This is a frickin’ psychopath coming in, going home, loading up three weapons and taking out four people,” said Randy, his voice straining.
He also questions who would allow Jensen, a 21-year-old “kid,” to run around armed to the hilt even though the guns were all registered to him.
Important family traditions, like chopping down a Christmas tree and decorating it with her grade-school ornaments, will never be the same without his daughter.
But finally, the good days are starting to outweigh the bad, he said. And he’s pouring his attention into caring for Mya, his daughter’s cherished pup.
“Feeling good in the beginning is really difficult, finding happy moments is incredibly difficult, but you do go on,” he said. “I am laughing now. I can
You don’t have an option. You kind of have to keep it together
RANDY STEPPLE
laugh again already.”
McFarland said she has regrets not trying to intervene or speak up when she heard about or witnessed her friend being mistreated.
She insists Stepple was not afraid of Jensen; she wasn’t a “battered woman” and she always stood up for herself.
But McFarland wonders if there was something she could have done that might have made a difference.
“I’m kicking myself. Why didn’t I say: ‘He doesn’t treat you very nicely. Why don’t you get out?’ ”
When reached at home, Jensen’s father declined to comment.
The families say it’s difficult to think about the events of that day, but they appreciate the small gestures the community has made to memorialize the lives lost.
An annual pre-season ball game in May has now been renamed as a memorial match, with money raised earmarked for the Tanner Craswell and Mitch MacLean Memorial Fund — a scholarship that has already benefited three baseball players from the Maritimes.
The We Found Love dance tribute in memory of Tabitha Stepple has already raised $9,000 toward dance scholarships.
At Spitz Stadium, placards of Tanner and Mitch’s jerseys — now retired — hang on the outfield fence. A memorial glass case displays a dusty pair of cleats, a bat and other sentimental items. Photos of the boys’ glory days are tacked up on the walls and in Kvame’s office.
Just outside Claresholm lies a roadside memorial with small crosses for each victim bearing their names, stuffed animals, pink plastic flowers, and various baseball-related items — even tins of chewing tobacco. Claresholm resident Norman Bourassa, 75, was so touched by the tragedy that he visits the site almost daily.
“We want to remember, but at the same point in time, we have to move on … keep living,” Kvame added.
Meanwhile, Conway — who has undergone months of recovery and rehabilitation — has moved back to Prince Edward Island into her new Habitat for Humanity house. She is still consulting with specialists to improve motion in her wounded hand. But there are now days where she can get around without a cane, said McFarland.
She said she’s impressed by Conway’s resilience and selflessness, and the positive attitude she tries to keep.
“We are lucky to have Shayna,” added Dianne MacLean, who has grown close with Conway and keeps in touch with her on a regular basis. “She has been an inspiration and added so much to our lives.”
The friendships that have arisen between the families, although under tragic circumstances, have brought some comfort, she said.
Volunteer work has also helped Dianne through tough times.
On Saturday, to mark the date, she said she and Conway plan to venture out to a memorial field in P.E.I. dedicated to her son and Craswell to light a candle.
While the pain of losing her son will never go away, Dianne said she has tried to reach out to the Jensen family to let them know she has forgiven him. She said she believes he was ill and no one picked up on the signs.
“I just think of the torment he must have been going through to do such a thing,” she said. “(Derek’s mother) needs to know we don’t blame her and we don’t blame him.”
I’m kicking myself. Why didn’t I say: ‘He doesn’t treat you very nicely?’
CAIT MCFARLAND