[Ryan McMahon] Thunder Bay.
I have family members in the city.
I played hockey there, I grew up around there.
Thunder Bay was the city that...
when you wanted to go to the big city for new shoes before
the first day of school, that's the place you'd go.
♪
I knew its history, I knew its reality.
I knew some of what we would find...
[Cop] Do not spit on me!
But I had no idea that we would find what we did.
♪
So this is the intersection where
Barbara was hit with a...
with a trailer hitch.
He threw it out the window and it hit Barbara Kentner.
He laughed and said, "Ha-ha, I got one!
I got one of them!"
[Clanging metal]
♪
It seemed like every other week,
a new story would emerge from Thunder Bay,
a devastating story,
another young person has died.
[News] An unidentified body has been discovered
in a river in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
What the hell is going on here?
[Ryan] So like in the realm of possibility,
could there have been someone targeting Indigenous people?
The further we dug into those stories,
the more I realized that it was almost like pulling a
thread off a sweater, and you have to be careful,
because pretty soon the whole sweater unravels.
We have cover ups, conspiracies...
It's impossible to do a death investigation
in four or five hours.
They're all aimed at keeping the truth
away from the public eye.
I'm a father, I've got two young Ojibway girls.
It's statistically more probable that they will
die at the hands of violence here.
Because that's what the numbers tell us.
The bottom line is this:
It's racism, it's discrimination.
It's because they are Indigenous, that's it.
♪
[Rolling thunder]
♪
[Ryan] Thunder Bay,
a place that will hurt you if you love it.
And it's a place I love.
My name is Ryan McMahon
I grew up a few hours away from here,
in a small town called Fort Frances.
My home reserve is Couchiching First Nation.
I have family and friends in Thunder Bay.
I played hockey here.
I've hung out in this city since I was a kid.
In a way, it's home for me.
Good morning, sir.
In 2018, I made a podcast series to try to dig into the
rumours and bullshit I heard was happening here.
The racism may be polite, but the racism still kills.
It seemed like every other week a new story would
emerge from Thunder Bay, a devastating story.
Another young person has died.
Some weird corruption would hit a headline.
[News] Accused Thunder Bay police Chief JP Levesque
was called to testify this afternoon on the obstruction
of justice and breach of trust trial against him.
Making the podcast series just turned up
more questions than answers.
Like, why do Indigenous people
keep turning up dead in this town?
Why are Indigenous teens targeted here?
Why isn't the leadership in this city
doing anything about it?
♪
When I was making the podcast series,
this is where I would come to sort of reflect.
There's so much beauty here.
You have Nanabozho, the sleeping giant.
But then there's these, you know...
these, just these ugly things.
[News] It's a title no city wants,
but Thunder Bay is back at the top of the list for
homicides across Canada.
Thunder Bay police are releasing a few more details
about the tragic discovery of a body
in the waterway near the Thunder...
...police are investigating a body found this morning
in Chapples Park.
...Thunder Bay police have released little information
regarding the discovery of a dead body overnight.
Thunder Bay is the murder capital of Canada.
Thunder Bay had more murders per capita in 2010,
2012, 2014, 2016,
2017, 2018, 2019.
I have a cousin who was murdered here.
The Thunder Bay Police Service
botched the investigation.
As a result of that, we as a family
may never have the justice that our family,
his parents, and he deserves.
♪
Frequently, the deaths are not even news.
Frequently, the deaths are not even well known.
Frequently, the deaths are a blip in the paper of
four inches and that's the end of it.
[News] The number of hate crimes in Thunder Bay has
doubled from 2019 to 2020.
Almost a third of all Indigenous hate crimes
in Canada are reported in Thunder Bay.
You would think they would be impossible to ignore.
And yet, number one, they keep on happening,
and number two, it continues to be socially acceptable not
to believe that there's any sort of pattern to any of this.
After finishing the podcast series,
I thought I was done telling stories about this city.
I was wrong.
The podcast just barely scratched the surface.
I feel it in my bones.
There is something far darker going on here than I realized.
And it honestly feels...
like no one gives a shit.
I'm not fucking Columbo.
And I'm not trying to say that I'm going to get to bottom of
these cases and find murderers,
but it's not enough to say that
these things just don't add up.
So, I'm back.
I can't look away.
I won't look away.
I'm not letting this go until there are answers.
The families whose loved ones died here...
deserve answers.
♪
[Sirens]
One of those families is the Kentners...
and a story that's rocking this city to its core.
♪
It's a safe neighbourhood if you're
from this neighbourhood, for sure.
Otherwise, if you're driving around making a TV series,
maybe that's a bad idea.
This is where Barbara Kentner's life came to an end.
I'm not even comfortable being down here like this,
like this is a place we shouldn't be.
But I also think it's a place it's important that
we understand and contextualize in some way.
As we can see, there's a lot of street level action.
A lot of young Indigenous women
standing out here trying to work.
And the more we drive around and disrupt that work,
the more of a problem it's gonna be.
And I'm now being followed by a couple vehicles.
♪
This is an area where sex workers and...
I guess low-income folks live.
And it's a specific neighbourhood that if you are
of a certain ilk in Thunder Bay,
you come here to point fun at and point fingers and
call names, and...
It's a long-standing problem here that people looking to...
exploit the situation down here
know to target this place.
In the early hours of January 29th, 2017,
Barbara Kentner, a 34-year- old Anishinaabe woman,
was hit by a trailer hitch thrown at her
from a moving vehicle.
We were leaving my sister's house and
we were heading to my son's house.
I seen the car and the guy was hanging like,
half way out the window, like his whole half his body
was sitting outside the window.
He swore and said, "Oh, I got one of them,"
and then he starts laughing.
And then I look and I see my sister bent over,
and she was like, "Miss, I got hit with something!"
And then I look on the ground and there's a trailer hitch.
[News] Some prominent Indigenous leaders,
including Nishnawbe Aski Grand Chief Alvin Fiddler
have called on Thunder Bay police to investigate the
incident as a hate crime.
This is a pretty typical trailer hitch,
you might say it's your universal trailer hitch.
It can pull 3500 pounds.
And you drop your boat onto the back of this and
you tow your boat to the lake,
your camper, trailer to the lake.
And after a day of drinking, Brayden Bushby makes
his way back into the city of Thunder Bay,
and he decides he's gonna throw this at two women
walking down the street, like anyone else would...
on any given night.
And every decision he made,
from the time he retrieved this from the street,
to the time he took his seat belt off,
to the time that he...
he unrolled the window,
to the time where he sat his ass...
on the window sill, holding the headrest of his seat.
To the time he put this up in the air to throw it.
Every decision he made to do that was another chance
he could have said, "No, I'm not gonna do this."
But he chose to.
'Cause once he threw it out the window and it hit
Barbara Kentner, he came back into the car and
he laughed, he said, "Ha, I got one!
I got one of them."
♪
[Clanging metal]
♪
5 months after the incident, on July 4th...
Kentner died of her injuries.
It hurts.
She's with my mom and dad now,
but she shouldn't be, you know.
She's leaving, she's leaving her 16-year-old daughter....
behind, I can't.
♪
This has been going on for so long and...
My mom...
She...
♪
[Sniffling] She deserves justice.
And I deserve to finally be able to grieve.
♪
But in September of 2020, there was a major-
and controversial- development.
[News] The Crown has announced it's withdrawing a
second-degree murder charge against Bushby for his
alleged involvement in the death of Barbara Kentner,
and will instead proceed with a charge of manslaughter.
[Cars honking]
Bushby has pleaded "not guilty."
And now, the verdict is due in two days.
How could something like this happen here?
I think at least some of the answers lie way back,
in the very beginnings of this city.
♪
Thunder Bay is on the northern shores
of Gitchi Gamig...
or Lake Superior.
It's humble, it's rugged and,
more than anything, it's tough.
It's where fur traders and lumberjacks and miners and
sailors and entrepreneurs of all stripes
came to try and build a life.
And, for the Anishinaabe, my people that have lived
here for thousands of years, this place is home.
Thunder Bay is one of the furthest places from
an ocean in the world.
We are 8 hours north of Minneapolis.
We're 8 hours east of Winnipeg.
We are, by global standards,
in the middle of nowhere.
It feels more remote here sometimes than
it feels like in the Yukon.
So, there's a sense of alienation here.
There's a sense of righteousness and resistance.
Because things just do work differently here.
The form it takes is strongman-type leadership
that we started seeing with Walter Assef,
in particular, as mayor.
I was the one elected to run this city with this council,
and I will not take dictation from you or
anybody else in here. I want you to know that.
Mr. Mayor, it's not dictation,
we proceed according to the bylaws
established by the corporation.
We'll change the bylaws too. I'll show you that.
[Off-screen] "I'll whip you bad, I will!"
"You're not a man!"
Don't you cross me again, Joe.
-I'm not crossing you. -Don't cross me!
I don't cross you...
I'll tell you, one of these days, I'll whip you bad.
-So I'm gonna tell ya- -Well, you can do that.
I will. You're damn right I will!
That kind of "tough guy," frontier mentality
started here early on.
The settlers who came to Thunder Bay were immigrants,
and they stayed here against the odds.
They built it up, they fought to survive.
Now they look at others who come here as the outsiders.
Even people like me.
[Travis] The white community in Thunder Bay,
we live a very insulated, safe life
in these certain bubbles.
We're a lunch bucket town, we're a mill town,
we're a lumber town.
"Grandpa grew up working in the bush,
in the sawmills," and all those stories, right.
It's a cash for life job, that's what we call it, right?
[Jon] In northern Ontario, the economies have
traditionally been based on resource extraction.
In the mid-90s, it shifted.
The paper industry started going down,
pulp and paper started falling off in a way that
it would never recover from.
[Riley] I think for the middle-class folks who
were promised this Canadian dream
in northwestern Ontario,
there's this real resentment that starts to happen.
You know, I think there is a bitterness,
and I think they're looking for somebody to blame.
And I think in Thunder Bay, it's really easy
to blame Indigenous people for that.
And what are they blaming Indigenous people for?
The free dental, the not paying of taxes,
the cheap gas and cheap smokes that
we can get on the reserve.
You know, the perks of being Indigenous,
the consolation prizes we got for colonization.
So, I grew up in a small rural town north of Thunder Bay,
also a service hub for the remote First Nations
in the north.
I've been here in Thunder Bay for 11 years.
I've been told, you know, "Just go back to the rez,"
things like that and, you know,
those things happen in public places like in
children's hockey change rooms, for example,
so quite normalized and acceptable
to say things like that.
But those are the kinds of things that Indigenous people
have to deal with daily.
I remember like being in like the sixth grade and like
my friends around me and stuff like, you know,
my white friends that I were going to school with.
Their older sisters or brothers were getting jobs at
like the mall and they were like, "Oh my God,
it's always like the terrible Native people that
come and like ruin everything."
And then I'd sit there and look at them because
they would know I was obviously Indigenous and they-
it was always then, "But you're different.
You're, you're not like those Indigenous people, Riley."
I'm somewhat white passing...
but I think about my daughter who's a lot more
brown-skinned than I am, and...
just kind of being so aware of that in a city where
you're wondering if the person behind you in
the grocery store line is thinking,
"What's this Indian doing here?"
And what kind of, you know, negative stereotypes
they're thinking about you.
When I was making the podcast,
I asked people living in Thunder Bay for their thoughts.
And, you'd think people would be hesitant to talk
about stuff this publicly, but...
Nope, I was wrong.
[Woman] I hate to sound like a "racist", but...
It's the northern population, we just harbour them in and
nobody is in control of their behaviour.
[Man] It's not about us mistreating them,
there's no racism, it's about idle hands.
[Man 2] I think it's just people being stupid, right?
Being around there when they're drinking
or whatever, horse-playing.
[Woman] They don't know civilization.
♪
That kind of ugliness showed up with a vengeance
in the months after the death of Barbara Kentner.
[Cars honking]
[Riley] Barbara's story was so personal.
The night that she was first attacked,
she was walking to my friend's house.
I think there are probably a bunch of reasons why people
cared about Barbara's case so much.
In Thunder Bay though, specifically.
I think part of that had to do with the way that
Brayden Bushby, specifically, was somebody
so symbolic of, I think, Thunder Bay at large.
Because the thing about Brayden Bushby, right,
is that like, that's every boy, basically,
I went to high school with.
That's all of like, you know, the people that
I would encounter when I worked at,
like the McDonald's downtown.
And, you know, when I would go down to the pubs
in the city, he's everyone.
And that's really, you know, apparent when you realize
that there is not really any visible Indigenous person
in that city that has not had something thrown at them,
that has not had some sort of like
racist BS spewed at them.
It all comes from just different variations
of that man.
This symbolic journey of white men travelling to the
bad side of town to do mean things to Native people and
then go back to their nice white houses,
this happens so fucking much in Thunder Bay,
it's disgusting.
People hear about trailer hitches,
but they don't hear about chicken McNuggets.
They don't hear about eggs
'cause it doesn't make the news.
This stuff goes on all the time.
We are here gathering today for tomorrow's event
about the Kentner family.
And we are also have to deal with racism in Thunder Bay.
That is the reason why she is gone.
It's not going to be safe as long as we don't work on it.
[Cheering & applauding]
♪
Even though during the trial, Bushby admitted throwing the
trailer hitch at Barbara, his lawyers claimed
it wasn't the reason she died.
They blamed it on her "lifestyle".
I was getting the updates on Twitter,
and watching the way the defence framed Braydon Bushby
versus the way they framed Barbara also, you know,
talking about her history of substance abuse,
talking about her previous illnesses and just really,
you know, villainizing her in this case while making him
out to be, this like scared little white boy,
was... was so infuriating.
It was very smart on the part of the defence because that's
exactly how Thunder Bay likes to think of themselves, right?
Brayden Bushbys are everywhere.
Like our city produced Brayden Bushby and
will produce another one.
And there will be no transformation...
as long as we just continue to reproduce that model.
What do you expect then, tomorrow?
Like, what, what-
tomorrow's the start of something new, perhaps?
Thunder Bay doesn't care about Indigenous lives.
And that is not gonna change with a verdict.
-See you tomorrow! -Okay!
♪
After almost four years, Barbara Kentner's family is
now just hours away from finding out if their hopes
for justice will be fulfilled.
But elsewhere in northern Ontario,
there are dozens of other families who dream of getting
answers to the unsolved deaths of their loved ones.
They are all tragic, but, for me as a father,
some have hit me especially hard.
Jethro Anderson, 15.
Curran Strang, 18.
Paul Panacheese, 21.
Robyn Harper, 18.
Reggie Bushie, 15.
Kyle Morriseau, 17.
Jordan Wabasse, 15.
The Seven Fallen Feathers.
All young people whose deaths in Thunder Bay
were written off as accidental...
or simply undetermined.
But the stories around their deaths
bring up troubling questions.
Suspicious circumstances,
lack of meaningful investigations,
no charges laid,
and no justice for any of the families.
My career has been me traveling around,
talking with young people,
working with youth, doing comedy.
And I've met so many young people in my path that...
have...
hopes and dreams that they don't know how to achieve.
And when I heard the story of Jordan Wabasse,
I heard the story of a young person that found a way to
chase his dreams, and he wouldn't have died
if he wouldn't have come here.
♪
He would not have died if
he would not have come to Thunder Bay.
♪
You guys ready to go?
-Yes, sir! -Yeah!
♪ [Indigenous singing] ♪
-Everybody in? -Yeah.
1, 2, 3! Power of love!
Alright, guys, let's do this!
[Indistinct speaking]
♪ [Indigenous singing] ♪
♪
[Indistinct speaking]
Stay on 'em, stay on 'em, Kyler!
Thunder Bay is hockey heartland.
Most kids get strapped into skates from the time
they can walk here.
Gap, close the gap, right there, yep.
In Thunder Bay, going to the National Hockey League
is something that actually happens to people.
The city has the highest percentage of
NHL winners per capita in all of Canada.
Nice, nice, nice, move it up!
Here we go, here we go!
A lot of kids here dream of playing in the NHL.
15-year-old Jordan Wabasse had that same dream.
But at the time, Jordan's home community
of Webequie First Nation,
some 500 kilometres north of Thunder Bay...
didn't even have an indoor hockey rink.
So, Jordan persuaded his mother and grandmother
to let him come to Thunder Bay to play hockey.
He enrolled in high school in October 2010 at the
Matawa Education Center.
And that fall, he was drafted to play with this team,
the Current River Comets.
Oh!
What an unbelievable save.
♪
How many goals you scored here?
-Ah, my fair share, yeah. -[Laughing]
I like shootin' this way, though.
♪
You played hockey with Jordan?
I did, yes. I was a first-year midget.
Midget ranges from 15, 16 all the way to 17 years old.
It was my first year, I was a rookie on the team.
Part way through the season, Jordan Wabasse
joins the team. Um, just take us there.
First practice he steps on the ice,
he gets in that net and...
not a lot of pucks went in that net in practice,
that first practice, and all the practices after that.
And then I'm thinking like,
this guy's on our midget B team?
Are you for real right now? This is, wow, wow.
Yeah, and on a team that I thought couldn't get better,
now we're like basically unstoppable.
We were, we were really good, yeah.
I don't know if he had a game the entire time
he played for us where he played poorly.
We pretty much won every game he played.
And the last game that he played for us was in the
finals of a tournament, I think we won six-nothing.
The six doesn't do the nothing justice on the
scoreboard kind of thing just because...
you know, he was sensational, like,
he won us that final game.
By all accounts, Jordan had a real shot at
playing for a major junior hockey team.
And from there, who knows?
He had the drive and he had a dream.
But, four months after he arrives in Thunder Bay,
Jordan Wabasse disappears.
[News] We go to Ontario now.
It's a parent's worst nightmare.
A First Nation teenager missing in Thunder Bay.
15-year-old Jordan Wabasse was last seen getting off
a transit bus on the evening of February 7th.
♪
He was wearing a dark grey jacket,
a blue grey Toronto Maple Leafs hat,
black pants and white Adidas running shoes.
On February 7th, he did call me,
that afternoon probably around 4.
What did you talk about that day?
He was telling me about that Wisconsin game.
And that he was going to have another...
tournament that week.
I wanted to come out, his mom was coming out too.
But I didn't tell him that,
'cause I wanted to surprise him.
We have practice and Jordan's not there.
But it wasn't a totally out of the normal thing for
somebody to miss practice, right.
Work, school, girlfriends, whatever it may be,
guys missed. Guys missed hockey sometimes.
♪
The next day, towards the evening...
when they, they told me that he was still missing and that
he didn't make it home...
If a young child goes missing, you know,
a 13, 14, 15-year-old,
if you hope to find them alive,
you don't have a lot of time.
Especially in the wintertime.
You need to do everything you can within those first...
few hours or those first few days.
Bernice, who is Jordan's mother, and the father, Derek,
flew down from their community to stay in
Thunder Bay and to actively be on the ground searching.
It was an extensive search effort.
♪
It was a group of Indigenous searchers, not the police,
that found the first sign of Jordan.
The Toronto Maple Leaf hat that was found down by
the river, unfortunately, indicates that he may have
been down around the water.
After that, we're not completely sure.
Unfortunately, it seems that we may have
a tragic ending to this event.
♪
An unidentified body has been discovered in a river
in Thunder Bay, Ontario.
Boaters made the latest discovery near an area where
the hat of missing teen Jordan Wabasse
was found late last month.
The body that was recovered from the Kaministiqua River
last night is currently the subject of a post-mortem
examination here in Thunder Bay.
We are hoping that...
that will give a positive identification as to the
identity of this person.
The day after Jordan's body was found,
there was an autopsy in Thunder Bay.
Jordan's cause of death was, quote, "Cold water drowning,
with contributing factors being alcohol use and
cold ambient temperatures."
The report further states that, quote,
"In the absence of any other evidence,
there is no reason to suspect foul play," end quote.
♪
So, this is the bus stop where Jordan Wabasse got off,
the night he went missing.
It's alleged, the official story is that from here, he...
he walked about 2 and a half kilometres
to the Kaministiqua River,
where he allegedly fell in and drowned.
The thing we can't really square with that whole story
is that he was this close to home,
'cause I can see his door from here, you know,
I can see his house from here.
And it was minus 35...
in the dead of winter, in February, so...
We wanted to come here and do the walk and
see if we can make sense of it at all.
♪
So, Jordan Wabasse on that evening,
had been around the inner city area with friends.
And then, he headed home on the bus.
It was clear from the videos that
he was not super intoxicated.
He was happy.
When he got off the bus, he would have had to have gone...
about almost 2 kilometres
back down Mary Street, to James.
♪
Down through a dark underpass...
♪
Veer 30 degrees to the left...
♪
In the dark, to a dark bridge.
♪
It's alleged here is where Jordan Wabasse
fell into the river, and drowned and died.
Again, look at the map.
If his plan was to go the bridge,
he could have gotten off here at Frederica Street and James.
But instead, he got off at the bus stop
right in front of his house.
And then walked all the way back down to the bridge?
It just doesn't make sense.
♪
Maybe you would slide down it,
it was cold and icy and snowy.
But he would have hit the debris that's down here,
I mean, there are stumps, there are flat little ledges,
there are rocks.
Jordan's death was not properly investigated.
There are so many open -ended questions about,
how did he get there?
It's not clear that he wasn't forced there,
or that interactions happened with people that would have
ultimately led to him being in the river.
Not only are the police responsible to investigate,
the coroner's office at law is responsible to
do its own investigation.
So, when these deaths happened,
they didn't do that either. Right?
There are many examples like that.
♪
You know, you have the seven deaths.
There were many deaths before those deaths.
And we've had many more deaths since then.
♪
[Train horn]
♪
So, I have one spot I want to take you...
It's a metaphor
So, I like this spot.
It's got all these old docks, like all these...
like all these posts are like all the old wooden docks.
-Yeah. -And then it's got-
It still has like the remnants of what it used to be.
And it's kind of sad.
[Laughing]
-It is. -But then there's ducks.
There's ducks and there's geese.
And they don't care that Thunder Bay is sad.
Ah, it's such a beautiful place, this city,
and there is great places to get outdoors.
And I go down to Mission Marsh often for walks and
stuff like that.
But, I mean, you can't do that without
thinking about all of that either.
Chapples Park,
that's where Tammy Keeash's body was found.
[Indigenous singing & drumming] ♪
There was that one evening they had the vigil for her, right.
So, you had all the family and community members and...
people just grieving for her,
on one side of the hill.
♪
On the other side of the hill, you had like...
the non-Indigenous community going about you know
their regular daily activities, enjoying their sports and
children and families and...
probably completely oblivious to, you know,
the pain and heartache that was going on,
on the other side, it was just...
To see those like in your face, like,
I see those everywhere here in Thunder Bay.
Indigenous people die in Chapples Park all the time.
And that's where they want to put the
new soccer complex, you know, and it's like...
Man, there's two solitudes, there's like...
those that are privileged enough to not pay attention
and those that have to because their lives depend on it.
Yeah, just back there is where
Josiah Begg's body was found.
We are in a lot of pain and sorrow about the outcome
that Josiah was found.
We had hoped for a better outcome.
But it wasn't meant to be.
But he was, I mean, his body was so close to being...
like, lost out in the lake and would never have been found.
Yeah.
I wonder actually how many bodies there are...
that have gone, and are now, you know,
lost out on Lake Superior?
[Trickling & splashing water]
There have been so many deaths in this city already.
The Seven Fallen Feathers, and more.
In fact, there have been so many deaths here,
no one really knows the number.
With police investigations failing so badly,
how many more Indigenous people are there...
whose deaths were just let go?
♪
Is it too much to hope that justice
will finally be served...
in at least one case?
We believe as Ojibway people that,
that the offering is a way to...
to petition for help.
This tobacco offering is me just putting it on the land
and just letting those, those prayers and
those reflections kind of...
kind of be.
♪
♪ [Indigenous singing] ♪
[Sirens]
I sat down with Melissa Kentner the night before the
verdict in the case against her sister's killer.
Thank you for...
for agreeing to sit down with us for a few minutes.
The last thing she wanted to do was answer questions
from me, but there is so much riding on this case.
I guess I'm just kind of wondering...
what you're thinking, in terms of the verdict tomorrow
and, and what you're expecting.
Whatever happens tomorrow,
it will never bring back my sister.
You know, my sister is not here to help her daughter-
Fight, like, be with her
while she's fighting cancer, you know.
Her daughter's crying all the time, wants her mom.
But she can't have her mom. You know,
that's the sad part about it.
And so, the idea of justice then,
is there such a thing as justice?
No, there's not.
This process, it's been, it's been hell.
I wasn't able to get counselling for myself to...
sit there and try to help myself so I could
take care of my kids, and they're grieving also.
Because I wasn't allowed to talk about it because
I was supposed to be hush hush
because I'm the primary witness.
And they said if you- if I was to say anything
about the court, they would have to submit it.
And so, the idea of justice is not on the table for you...
and peace will be hard to come by?
I would like to see him behind bars for what he's done.
Like, I hate to say it, if it was a Native kid that did it,
that guy would have been already in jail.
He would have been still in jail, awaiting his trial.
When this all happened, you had to leave town.
After Barb's funeral, my kids started getting threatened
by these other kids, saying that they're gonna
throw trailer hitches at them.
So, I took them out of here.
And I didn't want Serena being around here either
in case something happened to her.
Thank you for coming to talk to us.
[Birds chirping]
♪
We're about 28 minutes away from the verdict.
♪
There's a heaviness that has certainly fallen here.
♪
[Off-screen] What do you hope for today?
I don't wish him harm. I don't wish his family harm.
I don't want for him to... suffer.
I want him to face the consequences,
whatever that is.
What could happen is he goes to jail.
What could happen is he walks,
with some sort of probation.
And in 28 minutes we're going to figure out
what the future looks like for Thunder Bay.
♪
And then... it happens.
Judge Pierce starts reading her verdict.
Quote: "The court must determine whether Mr. Bushby's
act of striking Miss Kentner with the trailer hitch
was a contributing cause of her death
that was not minimal." End quote.
When pressed during cross-examination,
Dr. Toby Rose- a forensic pathologist- stated that,
quote: "Miss Kentner was a very sick woman who would
have died as a result of liver disease,
but the complications hastened her death."
End quote.
However, she was unable to say by how much.
But, in the end, Judge Pierce concluded that, quote:
"In my view, the crown is not required to prove to
an absolute certainty what medical science does not know.
Therefore, I find Brayden Bushby guilty as charged
of the offence of manslaughter." End quote.
♪
[News] Describing her final decision,
Judge Pierce stated that the Crown proved beyond a
reasonable doubt that there was no intervening act that
displaced Bushby's responsibility for Kentner's
injury and ensuing death, and therefore,
Pierce agreed that through an unlawful act,
Bushby accelerated and eventually caused Kentner's
passing, and therefore, she found Bushby
guilty as charged.
When the verdict was read, like,
it was like these months and months of buildup,
just like totally exploded out of me,
like I sobbed for hours.
As soon as I saw the, like, you know,
verdict some up on my feed, I was like- [Gasping]
And it was like the long, long exhale after months of
what felt like holding your breath.
♪
I'm happy, but the thing is, why is he still able to
walk the streets until his sentence date?
It is! Well, look it,
look at the colour of his skin.
He gets to go spend holidays with his family.
What about Serena? She's fighting cancer,
she can't spend time with her mother.
I hate to say it, it's the truth.
That's... I want to say so much more,
but I'm gonna get myself in trouble.
♪
I don't want to say no more, I'm just starting to get mad.
♪
It's so unceremonious.
You walk out alone with your mom.
No one's talking, you stare at the ground.
And he has, you know,
he's going home for Christmas.
He just walks out and he goes home.
And he takes his suit off and he throws on some sweatpants.
It goes back to the question of, what is justice?
He's guilty of manslaughter, but...
I don't think anyone can feel good about today really.
Barbara Kentner's life is destroyed.
The Kentner family has lost a sister.
♪
In the grimmest possible sense,
the story of Barbara Kentner only highlights Thunder Bay
as Canada's murder capital.
But it doesn't fully explain why.
The truth is, is that, the things that happen here
are unique to this place because of this place,
because of where this place is,
because of the unique intersection between
Indigenous and non-indigenous people.
This city has never been able to...
wrestle with the answer of what to do about that.
♪
What happened to all of the teenagers
who died in Thunder Bay?
If these were white kids, after two,
can you imagine the outcry?
There have been concerns that there was in fact a
serial killer targeting vulnerable Indigenous youth.
A black SUV pulled up just right beside me.
He says the men grabbed his left arm and
punched him three times in the stomach.
There was blood on his face and
a large gash on his forehead.
There's running footprints that
lead towards the open ice.
There were witnesses who saw people
waiting at the bus stop for him.
He pulled out a 2x4 this big.
There's an old story about what farm boys do
to go have fun on a Saturday night.
He smacked me on the back with it.
They tip cows and have a good laugh about it.
I just kept thinking, get out, get out, get out.
So what if, instead of tipping cows,
they roll "drunk Indians" into the river?
♪