Wrong people accused?

3 men acquitted, but residents say company responsible for disaster in Quebec

MONTREAL — A Quebec man whose kid sister was one of 47 people killed in the LacMegantic tragedy says the three men acquitted Friday should have never been put on trial.

“I think, very sincerely, that since the day of the accident, these people have been living in purgatory and it must have been extremely difficult,” Bernard Boulet told The Canadian Press. “I’m happy these three people are free.”

A jury found Tom Harding, Richard Labrie and Jean Demaitre not guilty of criminal negligence causing the death of 47 people in connection with the July 2013 train derailment and subsequent explosion.

Boulet says he agrees with the verdicts.

“It was an unfortunate accident,” said Boulet, himself a former railway traffic controller. “It was caused by nonchalance and an accumulation of events — by the nonchalance of the (rail company) owner, Edward Burkhardt.”

Before and during the trial, defence lawyers and Lac-Megantic residents quite often brought up Burkhardt’s name.

They insinuated it was he who was primarily responsible for the tragedy in his role as chairman of the now-defunct, Montreal, Maine and Atlantic Railway.

Burkhardt’s company owned the train and the tracks on which it derailed.

Reached by telephone at his office outside Chicago shortly after Friday’s verdicts were announced, Burkhardt told The Canadian Press he wasn’t surprised to hear people were suggesting he should have been the one on trial.

“There were a lot of people screaming for people — including me — to stand trial and all that,” he said.

“The police and the prosecutors made a thorough investigation of what happened and so did the (Transportation Safety Board of Canada), and they concluded (if) there was going to be a prosecution it would be limited to the people that they brought, and I can’t say more than that.”

Burkhardt became public enemy No. 1 in the days following the crash, when his blunt, sometimes unsentimental remarks drew the ire of the grieving public.

His brief stop in Lac-Megantic is perhaps best remembered for his tumultuous news conference, during which he was heckled by angry locals.

Burkhardt points out he lost his investments in the company’s bankruptcy and that he agreed to settle in a civil suit brought against him even though he doesn’t feel he was personally responsible for the tragedy.

He did not say how much money he paid in the settlement.

“Everything I’d done with respect to that company was to try to enforce stricter and stronger safety standards, and the fact that it all came unglued that day was just horrible,” he said, adding he and everyone involved still lives with the burden of what happened.

Julie Morin, mayor of Lac-Megantic, said neither she nor the citizens of the 6,000-person town thought the three people accused were solely responsible for the tragedy.

“The company, MMA, had a big role to play in this,” Morin, who was not mayor back in 2013, said.