Road to redemption began at opposite ends
The mothers of a murder victim and the man convicted in his death carry the message of forgiveness and its healing effects on two grieving families.
Amother, maybe, best understands how to find forgiveness and redemption in the aftermath of murder. Two mothers, together, even more so.
Dona Cadman and Supriya Deas told a remarkable story before a crowd at Ottawa City Hall on Thursday evening about the power of restorative justice, and its healing effects on a family.
“I like to carry the message of forgiveness and how important it is,” said Deas, 62, before the event. “Two people from opposite sides of this atrocity.”
And, my, how they would know. One night in October 1992, Jesse Cadman, only 16, was walking home from a bus stop in Surrey, B.C., when he was attacked by a bunch of teens hanging around, getting high.
Though the plan was a mugging, it all went wrong. Jesse was stabbed in the back by Isaac Deas, also 16, and left by the roadside to die.
Deas would be convicted of second-degree murder, sentenced to life in prison.
It took a long time, but Deas grew up in prison, turned into someone else.
“Yes, he’s such a nice guy.” Imagine, this is Dona Cadman talking, about the man who killed her son.
Much had happened in the intervening 15 years. Chuck Cadman, Jesse’s father, became a well-known advocate for victims’ rights and youth justice. He would be elected as an MP in Surrey, but was stricken with cancer and died in 2005. In 2008, Dona took over his seat for one term.
In 2009 — now 17 years later — Deas reached out to the Cadman family with a letter, in connection with possible parole. It went to Jesse’s sister, Jodi, herself a mother. She was struck by its honesty, by the level of remorse. Eventually, she would meet her brother’s killer in a reunion that was videotaped.
Dona would see that video and be moved to meet Isaac, now well into his 30s.
“He had changed so much,” said Cadman. “He just wasn’t that kid anymore. Watching him, it was like, ‘Wow.’ A total difference.”
All these years, she had kept a mental image of this drug-troubled kid, so crazed he could kill someone. “Man, it was like being smacked up the side of the head.”
So when she met Isaac in person — without tons of foresight — she hugged him during a break in a threehour meeting and just said it: “I forgive you.”
“I could see him struggling so hard to become something, to make a life for himself,” said Cadman. “With his mother’s help, he was a totally different person.”
Indeed, Supriya had decided she needed to be with Isaac. In 2001, she moved to Quebec to be near her son, one of three children.
She visited him regularly, tried to teach him about meditation. Eventually, she said, he became a Buddhist, and a different person, and gained insight into the irreparable harm he’d caused.
The two women, meanwhile, were becoming friends, bonded by their own recoveries from this violent act.”
They have now spoken publicly several times about the value of restorative justice, like Thursday’s event, hosted by the Ottawa Restorative Justice Network and attended by about 100.
Supriya has even stayed at Cadman’s home in Vancouver. “I know, it’s weird,” said Cadman. She is alive to the idea that a victim’s family can be consumed by bitterness and anger. “It can eat you up. I have seen that so often. I have seen it destroy people,” said Cadman.
Deas, meanwhile, believes mothers experience this kind of tragedy differently. They carry a child in the womb, nurture it through infancy, are taken with the sweetness and curls, and imagine future, happy lives. “We don’t see our sons spending 19 years in federal penitentiary.”
She is grateful she and Isaac have been able to build a relationship with Dona and her family.
“I mean, I slept in her house last year. They had me over for dinner. I cry at the drop of a hat over that. It softens our hearts. Just such love. Everything we’ve tried to do to heal.”
She didn’t want to disclose too much about Isaac, except to say he’s out of prison and doing well.
The forgiveness, she said, couldn’t proceed until Isaac had shown he was a different person. This took years.
“It took him a long time to write the letter,” said Deas. “He threw many of them in the trash. You’re writing to the mother of the boy you killed. How do you do that?”
Cadman said the beauty of restorative justice — in which the offender and the victims are brought together at the right moment — is that it offers the criminal hope of “restoring” something that is lost, not just punishment in a cell.
“I’m in a better place,” she told the crowd. “I’m happier for having done it.”