“Nothing is the same as before,” says Jenni Wannamaker, not far from the waters of Quinte’s bay, where he lost his brother 10 years ago.
Wannamaker lives in the territory of Tyendinaga Mohawk, about 220 kilometers southwest of Ottawa.
During the last decade, the first nation has been dealing with the sudden deaths and subsequent police investigations of Wannamaker’s brother, Matty Fairman, 26, and Tyler Maracle, 21.
In the early hours of April 26, 2015, Fairman and Maracle went to the bay to make a spear fishing, but never returned home.
He followed a search throughout the community and an investigation that was initially led by the Tyendinaga Mohawk police before being delivered to the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
According to OPP records, fishermen found the maracle bodies and fairman almost two weeks later, about 15 meters away. Its boat was found at the bottom of the bay the next day, connected to 274 meters full of rotten fish.
At that time, the investigators concluded that the young people had cut the network, which the police believed that it belonged to another member of the community, and tried to take the fish to their boat, overload the ship and make it sink, and the two men drowning.
The Forensic Office classified its deaths as accidentals.
‘They were not thieves’
But the families of Fairman and Maracle have long rejected police theory about the circumstances of their deaths.
“There was no way,” Wannamaker said. “Matty and Tyler were intelligent. They learned to fish a long time.”
She said that the only reason they left that day was to show some children in the neighborhood how to properly clean the fish.
“They wanted to do something good. They weren’t thieves,” he insisted.
For years, Maracle’s mother, Tammy, protested outside the police station, asking the case to be reopened. She believes that her son and his friend may have been victims of the dirty game.
“I just kept fighting, fighting and fighting,” he said.
That fight has finally been worth it.
The case reopened after APTN’s investigation
Last month, after an investigation by the television network of the Aboriginal peoples (APTN), OPP reopened the case.
The investigators first had to exhume the boat, APTN reported that it had been buried according to a Mohawk tradition, then load it more than double the weight of the fish created by the police that was on the network when the men drowned, to see how they went on several scenarios.
The boat never sank. A follow -up study by the coroner confirmed the results.
“From the conditions described in this report, it can be safe to assume that the boat was not overloaded at the time of sinking,” concludes a report by Naval Architects byd.
The report also indicated that the boat was found with concrete blocks and more fishing network on board, all intact.
“Teams were found in the banks and the interior of the container in what seemed like a non -disturbed state, which seems to suggest that the descent to the lake bed was relatively flat,” the report concluded.
He offered several other possibilities for what could have happened that morning, but he ruled them all as unlikely, except one.
“The ship was affected by an external force and one or both gentlemen ended up in the water,” according to the report.
That external force, or perhaps an attempt of both men to climb from the same side of the boat, could have made water assume. However, according to the authors, “there are not enough evidence or signs of this that occurs in the container at the time of the survey.”
Cause of the deaths now ‘indeterminate’
Anyway, the findings led the main forensic of Ontario to reclassify indeterminate accident deaths.
“Which means we don’t know what happened,” said Dr. Dirk Huyer. “We are always open to listen and consider new information or information that could be different from what we find during our previous research.”
The OPP Commissioner, Thomas Carrique, ordered that the case be reopened, this time under the example of the Toronto Police Service (TPS).
“We respect the Toronto Police Service process and wait for its results, after which we will identify the next necessary steps based on its findings,” Carrique said in a statement to CBC.
The TPS confirmed that he is making a review of the investigation at the request of the Provincial Police.
A painful 10 years
Maracle and Fairman families have now been given a new reason to expect that they can finally get answers about what happened to their loved ones.
But his loss, and his belief that the police mistreated the initial investigation, has affected tremendous.
“It has been hell.
“How do you move without your baby?”
Tammy Maraccle said she and her husband Robin feel in the same way without her son.
“I would lie in bed just thinking, as, ‘Who am I going? Who will help me?'” He recalled.
At the cusp of a new investigation, Maraccle said he will observe the police closely.
“I hope … receive justice for us. But if they don’t, I will go out again,” he said.
