Re: Mom of Fallen RCMP officer tells of inquiry tale
The February issue of the Barrhead Leader featured an account by Mrs. Grace Johnston, whose son died along with four other men on March 3, 2005 in a Quonset hut near Mayerthorpe.
I have the greatest sympathy for her and other relatives still grieving after six years. As a minister of religion active for years, I have officiated at many funerals and memorial services and have talked with many grieving relatives. I have observed that people in grief honestly and unconsciously arrange their understanding of the events around particularly tragic deaths in a manner that is least painful to them. We must respect that and I do.
But it is another matter entirely to condemn other individuals to years in jail on the basis of a grieving mother’s sincere but mistaken impression of the facts of the case.
Respectfully, in the article, Mrs. Johnston says “Rozko was driven by Shawn Hennessey and Dennis Cheeseman by and past his own property and buildings and then was dropped off by them at his (Rozko’s) mother’s, right next to his own place.”
The Agreed Statement of Facts, written by the crown itself, says: “Roszko directed Hennessey to drive past the Range Road on which he lived” (page 14m Item 70), not travel on it, and actually the crossing was 2 1/2 miles south of Roszko’s quarter section. If you accept Mrs. Johnston’s misapprehension here, you surely think that in passing his farmyard they must have seen some of the six police vehicles there, but the trio never drove up his road and were never within a half mile of his quarter section and never saw any police cars from any other place.
The Agreed Facts then states: “He directed Hennessey to drive past his mother’s residence and to stop across the field from where the police were located.”
Well, Mrs. Johnston is correct in a rural sort of way when she says Roszko “was dropped off by them at his (Rozko’s) mother’s, right next to his own place.” City people might interpret this as meaning he was dropped off about fifteen yards from his own door. In fact, Mrs. Fifield’s dwelling is on an entirely different quarter section, over a mile away from his place, something like ten city blocks, and he was dropped 462 yards north of her driveway. I make this point because I have no reason to think Mrs. Fifield and her husband are in any way implicated in what happened eight hours later. “Right next to” has that possible implication, and in fairness to her, I feel it must be corrected.
But most importantly, Mrs. Johnston says:
“What would have mattered would have been a phone call or forewarning of any kind from anyone prior to the shooting. It did not happen.”
Her most cherished misunderstanding, one shared by vast numbers of people, has nothing to do with her grief, however. It is absolutely false, because she has been misled at the inquiry, as has the Canadian public, in a very reprehensible way.
The most astonishing thing about the Fatality Inquiry that Mrs. Johnston attended was that it completely ignored exactly a “forewarning of any kind from anyone prior to the shooting”. This warning was given by Constable Julie Letal, who was second on the scene and remained there for 12 hours.
In an article in the Edmonton Journal on March 5, 2005, actually entitled “Officers Were Warned,” reporters Sarah O’Donnell and Ryan Cormier stated:
Before she left, Letal said she offered a word of warning about the man police were dealing with.
‘When I went, I told the boys to make sure everything's clear, because he's watching us,’
“The boys” to whom she gave this warning were Mrs. Johnston’s son and another officer, Constable Gordon, who both had just arrived around 3 a.m. for a dangerous “night shift”. Four other officers were present when she spoke to them, including Corporal Jim Martin who was in charge, and could have heard. This group certainly should have seriously discussed her remarkable statement, which turned out to be absolutely true. Roszko in fact had been on the property for an hour and a half then. He stayed somewhere half that night, and he was probably at that time in his house-trailer about a hundred yards away, peeking out a window just as she said, right under their noses.
It is amazing that all officers there then and the two first arriving in the morning ignored Letal’s warning, and more amazing that to this day the fact of that warning, published in the newspapers, is consistently ignored as if it never happened. Much more amazing is the fact that Constable Julie Letal is alive and well and still with the force but was not called to testify at the inquiry. So it is no wonder Mrs. Johnston believes that there was no forewarning.
This warning was covered up by omission at the inquiry which was structured as a trial “proving” the Mounties did everything right and nothing bad would have happened if only Mr. Hennessey and Mr. Cheeseman, having seen “police car lights”, had called. They were tried and convicted without being there to defend themselves nor did any lawyer of theirs have standing.
If permitted, their lawyer would have pointed out that at the drop-off point, where there were supposed to see police car lights, it would have been through an impenetrable grove of trees 75 feet tall and 242 yards deep and behind a steel Quonset hut which itself could not possibly been seen from the drop off point. Therefore, it would have been absurd if they had called the police to report that the fact of Mr. Roszko’s homecoming. They had no idea, and could not have seen, that the police were there.
