The Decibel - New details emerge about the Saskatchewan stabbings

Episode Date: September 16, 2022

Initially, residents of James Smith Cree Nation did not want to welcome the reporters into their community following the mass stabbing attack that left 10 people dead on September 4, 2022. But after suspect Myles Sanderson died in police custody, things changed.Globe reporter Nancy Macdonald was allowed into the community and she worked with colleague Jana G. Pruden to help construct a better understanding of what happened prior to the tragedy. Jana explains what they’ve discovered from their reporting and how members of the First Nation are finding ways to move forward.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

Hi, I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and you're listening to The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. It's been nearly two weeks since a brutal mass stabbing attack took place in Saskatchewan. Ten people were murdered, 18 were injured, and the brothers the RCMP initially identified as suspects also died in the aftermath. When we spoke with reporter Alana Smith last week, she reminded us there were still so many questions that we didn't have answers for. We're going to try and see if we can piece together a lot of these details that people are still asking. You know, what happened? How are the families doing now? Who's related? Who's not related? Well, now we do have some of those answers. The Globe's Jana G. Pruden, along with reporter Nancy MacDonald, uncovered several new details about what happened during the attack

and how the James Smith Cree Nation, where the majority of the violence occurred, is processing such a traumatic event. Not only has everybody lost someone, most people have lost multiple people, right? That they cared about, that they loved, and absolutely everybody is touched by this and touched by this in really a profound number of ways. We reached Jana at her home in Edmonton to talk about what we now know and how that has changed our initial understanding of what took place. We're also going to get into some of the new details of the disturbing events that happened in Saskatchewan.

This is The Decibel. Jana, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Thanks so much for having me on. I'm really glad that we're getting to discuss this story with you now, because I think often with with big stories like this, there's, you know, there's a lot of media attention in the first few days. But in those early days, we usually don't we don't have a lot of the details or the like the proper information of what really happened. But in the days since, Jenna, have people in the community been more ready to talk about what happened? Yeah, you raise a really good point. You know, I think in those early days,

you know, there's so much happening. And in this case, there was still a manhunt ongoing. And people on the First Nation were obviously very afraid that there could still be more violence. Once he was arrested, and also we learned that he had died in custody, I think things changed quite a bit. So the big rush of media that had been there initially, that can be really overwhelming for communities and people started to go away after the story, the sort of breaking part of the story had ended. And that's when our reporter, Nancy MacDonald, started to really get to know some people in the community. And that's when we really saw a change that people were, I think, able and ready to start allowing some reporters into their community to

bear witness to the way that they are dealing with this tragedy. And what did the community want Canadians to know? This community, the James Smith Cree Nation, is much more than this tragedy. And I think what became really clear to us in working on these stories in the day to come is that they don't only want to be known as a place where horrible violence occurred. They don't want people only to be thinking about the details of how that happened, but also to understand the community more fully, to understand the victims more fully as people, and think about what may be led to this and what

will happen now. And of course, those are all our priorities, too, as reporters there. That's extremely important to us. So why don't we start there then? What have people there been doing since the attacks? Almost immediately, as soon as the bodies could come home, the bodies of victims, the Cree tradition of sacred fires and wakes began. And so that has been a really, obviously somber experience, but also really beautiful and also with a lot of laughter. So there's gatherings that are happening really

all day and night. There's food prepared at each wake. And so there's work that's being done by the matriarchs in the kitchens. You could just imagine in a community where so many of these ceremonies are ongoing at the same time, where people are just really going from wake to wake to wake. At the same time, there's been a lot of ceremony. Pipe carriers who traditionally host ceremonies have been traveling from across the prairies to hold healing ceremonies. And many people have joined them, including RCMP and members of the media. And so we're really seeing really profound grieving by returning to culture and ceremony and the teachings that have helped Indigenous people deal with traumatic things forever. Yeah. I want to back up now, I guess, and talk about some of the reporting that you've done and

that Nancy has done that's really kind of filled in some of the gaps in the sequence of events that have happened here. Let's start on the Friday before the attacks, actually, Jana. So this is two days before the attacks. What have we learned about, but what happened on the Friday before the attacks, actually, Jana. So this is two days before the attacks. What have we learned about, but what happened on that Friday? Yeah, we, talking to people who are close to the brothers, including Skye Sanderson, who was the wife of Damian Sanderson. But it appears to start on Friday when Miles Sanderson goes to his brother's house and he's really in a rage. Skye Sanderson says that he's assaulted his domestic partner.

He had a long history of domestic abuse and Skye described to us that it was a very bad scene and that he had been trying to run over his wife with a car at one point and that his brother Damien then left with Miles to try to go calm him down. So that's Friday night. Do we have any idea what happened between Friday night and Sunday morning then when the attacks occurred? We do know that on Saturday they went to another First Nation that was having a sports day that I believe was about an hour's drive away. Later in that day, they're seen in, back on the James Smith Cree Nation, they're seen at the store, they're seen at a house.

We have heard that they were drinking and doing drugs. And Miles in particular had a serious problem with drinking and doing drugs. And he had told correctional officials that, you know, he would go completely psychotic under those substances and that he could be violent when he was under the influence. But we don't know what happened after that until the police get called. I guess let's fast forward to Sunday because this seems to be kind of the next stage of when things happened. We know that nine people from the James Smith community were killed. How did the attacks unfold that day? What we know is that it seems to begin at Bonnie and Bucky Burns's house. Three people end up dead there and their son, a child stabbed in the neck, other children hiding. We have Miles's in-laws, Joyce and Earl Burns Sr. are stabbed at their house. Joyce has survived, but is still in very, very bad shape from what I understand. She's still very seriously injured.

Earl, who was a bus driver, everyone talks about him being, you know, he was a cowboy. He was an army veteran. He clearly attempted to try to either run the killer down or go for help in his school bus. And he actually died along the roadway in his school bus. We had a man and his mother killed inside their home. Skye Sanderson, who you'll recall was Damien's domestic partner, her father was killed at his home. His partner, Lana, was killed in her home. And Skye's sister and her sister's partner were both really badly injured. And then Robert Sanderson is believed to be the final victim on the First Nation. And then there's one fatal victim that's outside the First Nation, which is about 30 kilometers away in the town of Weldon.

That's a man named Wesley Pettersen, who is killed at his home. And we know this all started very early on Sunday morning, I believe 5.40 a.m. was the time when the first call to police was made. How many different scenes, how many different houses are we talking about here, Jana? Yeah, the police have said 13 different crime scenes. We know there was five different houses were roped off with crime scene tape. Sometimes a scene may also be, I think, inside the house. And if something happens in the driveway, we know that sometimes people were killed outside. I believe that would be counted as two separate scenes. Things like the school bus would be

another scene. And it was a day later as they were working on the First Nation that they, of course, found the body of Damien Sanderson located in the grass and in a stand of trees near where Earl Burns's bus was found. These are pretty horrific scenes we're talking about here, then. This is a lot for people to have witnessed or to have experienced there. You know, I've been doing this work for a long long time I've been focused on crime reporting for many many many years and this is I mean it is one of the worst mass murders in Canadian history I do think it's almost impossible to understand how grave howome, how terrible these scenes were. And the mark that they will leave on everyone who encountered them.

There's people in the community, you know, bodies lay in the sun for hours and hours and hours because the RCMP and coroner couldn't get to them. I mean, there was so much to process. So, you know, people in the community saw these scenes. Mark Arcand described waking up screaming in the middle of the night, haunted by visions of his sister's body. And, you know, there's something that really struck me that one of Nancy's people that Nancy was speaking with on the First Nation told her, which is, you know, that everyone will be changed by this. The people who live there, the people who responded to it, even media who went there.

And I think that's absolutely true. It's the kind of thing that that changes people. We'll be back in a moment. one of the suspects. But then the day after the attack, as you mentioned, Jana, his body was found by police and they said he died from non-self-inflicted wounds. So that, of course, suggests that he too may have been attacked. What did you and Nancy learn about Damien in your reporting? Yeah, you know, that has come up again and again as being really shocking to people who knew the brothers that Damien could be involved. He was quite well regarded by everybody that we spoke to. And people were really astonished by the idea that he could be involved.

There's this line that sticks with me that one man told us that, you know, Miles was always trying to drag Damien into the darkness and Damien was always trying to pull Miles into a better life. So there was this tension that people saw in them since they were children. And there's a lot of people that we spoke to that just simply do not believe that Damien was involved. They believe that Damien was trying to protect people or trying to stop his brother and that maybe that's how he got tangled up in it. I want to ask you about a scene that we've reported about Damien's wake. Can you tell me about what his wake was like in the community?

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm. So, you know, Skye Sanderson had told Nancy that she didn't expect anyone to be there. Skye said that she walked in, she just broke down to see that it was filled with people. And people there really remembered Damien for who he was as a family man. I gather it was a very beautiful ceremony. His coffin was draped in a Pendleton blanket. He had his Flames jersey hung on the wall. And a profound moment, I think, of grief and healing. Yeah.

I mean, it sounds like there's, yes, of course, lots of grief, also compassion here as well. Do we have any idea why the victims who lived in the James Smith community, why they might have been targeted? to Miles Sanderson, his in-laws, his brother's in-laws. There was a long history of intimate partner violence. It was extremely concerning both for people who knew them and also for people within the correctional and parole system. It was identified as a major issue, a major problem. He had numerous convictions for assaulting her in the past. And he had actually his statutory release from his parole sentence had been suspended at one point because he had been back with her and had been lying to his parole officer about it.

Some of them we don't exactly know. The RCMP did say early on that some were believed to be targeted and some were believed to be random. So some of those connections we can obviously see. Earl and Joyce being the most obvious, his in-laws that he had previously stabbed. He had convictions for assaulting both of them previously. Yeah, some of the others, I guess we don't know. Okay. And so we do see this actually more and more when we actually hear about these kind of mass or maybe just we're making those connections now when we're hearing about these mass casualty events, that intimate partner violence is something that's often in the background there. So going back to what we saw at Damien's wake, I guess I'm wondering with everything that we've learned, has there been any discussion of forgiveness more broadly? Yeah, there's been a lot of discussion of forgiveness. And even days after this event, there were already people telling Nancy that they had forgiven Miles.

And I think some of the work that's going on there to figure out how to move forward and how to forgive is really profound. And gives me a lot of hope for how the community will be able to move forward and recover from something that seems almost unrecoverable. Yeah. And so, Jenna, we've learned a lot of a lot of new details here in the last week. But but what do we still not know at this point? Yeah, I think there's been trying to stop his brother. That's a big question. Another one will be how Miles died. Miles died in custody.

RCMP have said only that he went into medical distress. We don't know exactly what that means. An autopsy is being done. But we'll certainly be watching to see what exactly was the cause of his death. And also looking at whether there was any people who aided him along the way while he was on the run. That's a serious element as well. And the RCMP have said they're investigating that. And of course, if that is the case, those people could potentially face charges.

Yeah. So it sounds like we may still actually get some more answers in the future. I guess, is there anything that we probably won't ever know about the situation? I mean, I think that question is always why. And even if you get an answer, there's never really an answer. And that's the thing we can't ever fully understand. So lastly here, Jenna, I guess, what's the way forward for this community? Donations have been coming in from around the country and around the prairies. And not just financial donations, but donations of traditional foods, bannock, fry bread.

So people are really, from outside, are really trying to show their care, trying to help. We talked about pipe carriers traveling in to host ceremony. You know, people will need serious resources to be able to deal with the trauma and the grief in the community. Individual people are thinking about things. Tyler Burns, who lost his adopted mother, Gloria, was thinking about how he could start, he called it sort of an anti-gang that could be a place for kids who need some support and so I think you know the road to healing is going to be a long one but that there's some really amazing things happening already in terms of people really thinking about you know how can we heal from this and how can we make sure that something like this never happens again, not just here, but in any other community. Yeah. Jenna, thank you so much for taking the time

to speak with me today. Thank you. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Welms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.