The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 (9 page)

The shots seemed to be coming from Ross's house. Foster let go of Ross, went back to his own house, and got his rifle—a high-powered sniper model that he is licensed to use on seals that get into the herring weirs. He climbed onto the roof and started shooting at the white Yukon parked in Ross's driveway. He fired at least once at Ross's porch light. “People in my group were saying, ‘Shoot the shooter,'” Foster later told the R.C.M.P. “I can't do that. I couldn't even put a person in my sights…. So I proceeded to shoot the vehicle to disable it for our own protection, so they wouldn't take off and get out of there. And, at the same time this was all going off, some people on our side had rocket flares, pistol flares, different things like that.” The exchange of gunfire
went on for five or ten minutes. Remarkably, no one was hit by a bullet, although Ross was struck in the leg by a flare. By the time the three available R.C.M.P. officers arrived, the shooting had stopped and no one was in the street. Later, though, fights broke out that the Mounties seemed powerless to stop. Both Ross and Irvine were beaten up. At some point, a couple of young men from Foster's side of the street circled around behind Ross's house, poured out some fuel, and tossed in a match. Flames shot out the back wall, and the people inside the house rushed out the front door.

When the Grand Manan volunteer fire company arrived, the firefighters figured that they might have to reserve one of their hoses to protect themselves, since they could hear shouts of “Let it burn!” and “Off the island!” Rocks were falling near the firefighting equipment. Eventually, the firefighters were satisfied that the blaze was out and they returned to the fire hall. Ross and some of his friends were escorted away by the R.C.M.P., leaving the house empty. Then, at four-thirty or five in the morning, there were explosions inside the house and it burst into flames. When the firefighters arrived this time, they encountered a pickup truck parked across Cedar Street to bar their entry. After that had been cleared away, the fire trucks were blocked by half a dozen people, including Sara Wormell, linking hands across the road. Sooner or later, the firemen were allowed through, but it was too late. Ronnie Ross's house was beyond saving.

 

C
ANADA WAS STARTLED.
T here were headlines across the country about the normally serene fishing community of Grand Manan—in the normally law-abiding country of Canada—having resorted to vigilantism. Crown Prosecutor McAvity moved swiftly to bring charges against those who had broken the law, partly to demonstrate that the authorities were not going to tolerate what he called mob rule. The R.C.M.P. was not able to find
out who had set the fire that actually destroyed Ronnie Ross's house, and Crown prosecutors eventually decided not to charge the people who had blocked the fire trucks or egged on the crowd. But five young men who worked in the fisheries were taken to jail on the mainland—arrested for offenses that could potentially lead to terms in the penitentiary. Two of the defendants were charged with having set the earlier fire, and three, including Carter Foster, were charged with participating in the shooting. (Ronnie Ross was charged with the same firearms violation and with having issued the fireball threat to Carter Foster and Sara Wormell.) A week or so after the incident, the R.C.M.P., apparently acting on tips that another person suspected of dealing drugs might be burned out, sent seventy officers to Grand Manan—a show of force that mainly just irritated the islanders. The mayor of Grand Manan, Dennis Greene, asked for an investigation of the R.C.M.P., which he claimed had spent a hundred thousand dollars on an after-the-fact invasion after years of saying that it didn't have a few thousand dollars in the budget to put a drug-sniffing dog on the ferry.

Overwhelmingly, islanders rejected the notion that the five incarcerated men were criminals. A sign went up at the ferry terminal in Grand Manan saying “Free Our Heroes.” All around the island, red ribbons were displayed to show solidarity with the defendants, who came to be known on Grand Manan as The Boys. A public meeting called by the R.C.M.P. to hear residents' concerns turned into a dressing down of the police for lax drug enforcement and a pep rally for The Boys. When David Lutz, a New Brunswick criminal lawyer, went to the island to meet with some people about representing The Boys, he was asked what sort of retainer he'd need. He said twenty thousand dollars. The next evening, as he sat in his car waiting to get on the seven-o'clock ferry back to Blacks Harbour, a man he'd never met before handed him an envelope with cash and checks totalling just about twenty thousand dollars. The fund-raising efforts eventu
ally included bake sales and the sale of T-shirts. The father of one defendant said later, “How many criminals are there that the community pays their legal bills?”

In November, when the trial of The Boys got under way on the mainland, a county weekly, the
Saint Croix Courier,
asked its readers about their sympathies, and eighty-two per cent of the respondents said that they backed the defendants. “These five men did what Mr. McAvity just said that they did,” David Lutz said in his opening statement, after the Crown prosecutor had outlined what the jury would hear. “The issue is why they did what they did that night.” Lutz's strategy was based on necessity: all five of the defendants under videotaped R.C.M.P. questioning, had admitted their roles in the gunfire or the arson. As the defense presented it, “They acted out of fear for their lives and the lives of others.” Lutz portrayed the gathering at Carter Foster's house as a sort of “mobile neighborhood watch” that went “horribly wrong” when shots began coming from Ross's house.

If the crowd had gathered for the “peaceful intervention” that Lutz described, the Crown prosecutors replied, how come there were rifles at the ready? And what, they asked, does setting fire to someone's house have to do with self-defense? Although “the Crown is not here to support Mr. Ross's life style,” Crown Prosecutor Randy DiPaolo said, the defendants “do not get an exemption from the criminal-justice system because they're fishermen or because they work hard.”

Ronnie Ross's record, introduced into evidence, reflected that before he moved to Grand Manan he was convicted of crimes like extortion and assault. He had never been convicted of selling drugs, though, and there was only sketchy testimony about drug dealing at 61 Cedar Street—most of it concerning Terry Irvine. Ross admitted using crack, but, like Irvine, he denied being a dealer. When Lutz asked him why he bought so much baking soda, an ingredient of crack (“You're not a baker, are you? You don't make cookies and muffins”), Ross said that he used it to
deodorize his refrigerator. The one person Ross identified as having been at 61 Cedar Street while crack was being smoked was one of the men on trial for trying to burn the place down because it was a crack house. Ross, who had testified that he'd lived on Grand Manan for ten years, said that the assumption that he was a crack dealer was caused by prejudice against outsiders: “Islanders stick together. If one person doesn't like you, no one likes you. They gossip and stories get twisted around.” As for any plans to travel around in the Yukon burning down houses on a hit list, Ross's friends testified that they had gathered at his house that night for their usual Friday-night pastime of getting drunk or getting high. Terry Irvine, who, according to some witnesses, may have fired the first shot, testified that he'd been too drunk to remember much of anything about the evening.

The jury found those who admitted to shooting guns that night not guilty—in his charge, the judge had said “the law doesn't require somebody to run to the woods if they are being attacked”—but it found the two arson defendants guilty. Foster was also found guilty of the minor charge of unsafe storage of weapons, and another defendant was found guilty of firing a flare gun. The verdicts were not popular. There were tears in the courtroom, and the mood on the ferry going back to the island was sombre. The reaction softened a bit when, without objection from the Crown prosecutor, the judge handed down lenient sentences; the most severe, for the arsonists, included a form of house arrest. Editorialists tended to detect a sensible Canadian compromise between the requirements of lawfulness and mercy. “The island people were well satisfied that they didn't go to jail,” one resident said recently. “If those boys had gone to jail for a year, I'd be scared to say what might have happened.”

 

A
COUNTRY SONG
about T he Boys has been posted on the Internet: “They were known as The Boys. And they were fisher
men. Cared about their families. They cared about their friends. Looked out for the neighbors. Out on Grand Manan. They were known as The Boys. And they were fishermen.” Some Grand Mananers, including some of those who were willing to contribute to the defense fund, feel a bit uneasy about The Boys' being portrayed as the equivalent of the peaceful farmers in a Western who finally rise up against the gunslingers hired by the wicked cattle baron. “They weren't exactly the churchgoing crowd,” one islander said recently. There are, of course, some people on Grand Manan who have never felt even enough solidarity with The Boys to accept the term. (“They're not boys. They're grown men.”) Some volunteer firemen, for instance, were shocked at the scene on Cedar Street that night; they are understandably accustomed to a different reception when they show up, at some risk and for no pay, to save a neighbor's house. “You can't carry out vigilante justice,” one of them said not long ago. “If the drug dealers had had more people, Foster's home would have been burnt out.” Such opinions, though, tend to be expressed privately.

By now, most of the red ribbons, many of them bleached pink by the harsh Maritime winter, have been taken down. Among the last to go were three or four bright-red towels that until recently were still draped around trees in the front yard of Carter Foster and Sara Wormell. They have decided to stay in Grand Manan for the time being, although they'd like to figure out a way to spend some of the winter months in British Columbia. By this time of year, tall stakes driven into the ocean floor have been connected with netting, a process sometimes called “suiting your weirs,” and people like Foster are getting up at a quarter to five every morning hoping to find the nets full of herring. The shed in back of their house has been repainted, but Foster can put his fingers in two bullet holes. At times, he has said that he wished he hadn't been present on the night of the fights and the gunfire and the house-burning. He calls the twenty days he spent in jail awaiting
bail the worst twenty days of his life. (“To me, that would have been a good enough sentence if I had done something really horrific.”) He has said that he's haunted by the thought that he could have been killed or that he could have killed somebody else. On the other hand, he thinks that some good has come of the altercation with Ronnie Ross. “They're talking about a center for the young people, and a paintball field,” Foster said recently. “There's going to be some recreation for the young kids. The only recreation I had growing up was to go get drunk.”

Many islanders would agree with Carter Foster that Grand Manan is better off than it was before he and Ronnie Ross met in the middle of Cedar Street—or will be if the grants that the village has applied for come through. That opinion is often followed by “Of course, I don't condone violence,” but it also might be followed by the observation that a smarter way to get rid of someone like Ronnie Ross would be to wait until he was out of the house some dark night, drop in a Molotov cocktail, and “run off into the woods like a rabbit.” Although there are still drug dealers on the island, none of them are outsiders who make themselves out to be big-time gangsters. There seems to be more focus on doing something about the drug problem. Now that Terry Irvine is no longer making regular visits in one S.U.V. or another, islanders are more relaxed about leaving tools unguarded—even though no evidence was ever presented that Irvine and Ross were behind the thefts. In fact, Irvine is in jail. This spring, in St. John, he pleaded guilty to stealing several thousand dollars' worth of goods from three Atlantic Superstores, in full view of surveillance cameras—committing what his own lawyer summed up as “a rather stupid offense.”

And Ronald Ross is no longer a menacing presence on Grand Manan. His house is gone. Where it stood, there is simply an empty lot with some charred rubble. People see the end of his Grand Manan sojourn in varying ways. The Crown prosecutors believe, of course, that a mob put itself in the place of legally con
stituted authorities, while most residents of Grand Manan prefer to believe that islanders, regrettably, had to do what the R.C.M.P. seemed unwilling or unable to do. If it is true that the R.C.M.P. offered to turn a blind eye or even encouraged the violence, the legally constituted authorities could be said to have used the islanders as an unregulated auxiliary to get rid of Ronnie Ross. One resident of Cedar Street told the R.C.M.P. that, despite all the talk of drug problems, the eruption of violence was essentially part of a “personal war” between Ross and his neighbors—another way of saying that what really got Ronnie Ross put off Grand Manan was what Laura Buckley called his “asshole issues.”

At Ross's trial in April, he was found guilty of the “ball of fire” threat but not guilty on the gun charge. (The judge, who heard the case without a jury, said that in his opinion the islanders at Foster's assembled not for a peaceful intervention but in the hope that something would start so that they could finish it.) Ross, who had been confined to his father's house in Nova Scotia since the previous summer, was sentenced to time served. After the sentencing, he told reporters that he might go back to Grand Manan once he is no longer prohibited from returning by the terms of his probation. A lot of people took that as just more Ronnie Ross bravura—when Mayor Greene was asked about it recently, he laughed—but Laura Buckley says that some people who know Ross believe that “he will actually have the brass balls to return.” Being an outsider and presumably not a student of history, after all, he may not realize that, in Marc Shell's formulation, he has been banished.