Just before the 2001 Symposium in Peterborough, Ontario,
I received a telephone call from the Office for Victims
of Crime in Toronto.
They asked me if I knew anything about the Symposium,
about the Restorative Justice Intiative in Peterborough
and if I could
possibly attend the 2001 Symposium to see what was going
on. I
was very skeptical of the whole notion of ‘Restorative
Justice’ and
extremely protective of the position of victims within
the process.
In any case, I attended the Symposium and didn’t learn
anything
that made me feel more at ease.
Then, earlier this year, I was asked to meet with members
of the organizing
committee for the next Symposium to talk with them about
the position of
victims within the justice system and I found myself
impressed with the
sincerity of their intent to understand the particular
challenges that victims
face not only within the justice system, but within the
community in general.
Somehow, in one year, I have gone from an avowed sideline
skeptic to
a guest speaker. And
still I’m not quite sure how that happened.
To begin: I
cannot speak for all victims of crime, only for myself.
But I
hope that in sharing my story I can provide you with some
insight into victim
issues and possibly, some ways in which you can help.
For almost 14 years, I have been a member of a very
select group - the parent
of a murdered child.
It is in memory of my son, Robin Sean James
O’Connor that I dedicate my time with you today.
I’d like to tell you about him.
At first he was Robbie, occasionally Bert,
(you’d have to ask his friends about that one) never
Robin, mostly just ‘Rob’.
Rob is not my biological child.
His mother died of a drug overdose when
Rob was seven. Rob
is my child by adoption.
In the late 1970s, my husband and I approached the
Peterborough Children’s
Aid Society with the prospect of adoption.
We were told of the lengthy wait,
the shortage of available children and pretty much
discouraged from even
beginning the process, until we said the magic words:
‘What about older
children? Maybe
two?’
Suddenly catalogues filled with pictures of children came
down from the
shelves - pages and pages of older kids in need of
families. Still, the
preparation for adoption took several years.
Time enough for us to begin to
appreciate the task we were taking on.
Rob was nine years old the first time we saw him, on the
television program
‘Family Finders’.
That was in February of 1981 and we had already been
approached by the Toronto Children’s Aid Society as
prospective parents for
Rob and his younger brother Clayton. The Irish knit sweaters they wore that
day became part of our family’s ‘adoption story’
since there were no tiny
baby clothes to save and treasure. I have them tucked away in a cedar chest
at home. A
month or so after the television program we met with Rob’s
social worker and she filled us in on the story, as much
as was known, of
Rob’s life.
Rob had suffered considerable physical and emotional
abuse in early
childhood - being generally terrorized by his stepfather,
a Toronto-area drug
dealer. Rob’s
mother would hide him in a cupboard or he would run away
into the woods near their apartment when his ‘father’
came home. In one
incident, we were told, Rob came out of hiding to save
his younger brother
from a beating and took the punishment himself.
Rob and Clayton often went hungry. More than once they were driven away
from home in the middle of the night as their parents
eluded the police.
One day, Rob returned from playing in the street to find
the apartment locked
and his parents gone.
Hand-in-hand with his little brother, he knocked on the
door of the building superintendent. The police were called and the boys
were taken into foster care that day, just as they were,
with nothing but the
clothes they were wearing.
Rob was six years old.
Rob and Clayton spent three years in foster care in
Toronto. Meetings were
scheduled through the CAS with the parents, but they
never came; then one
day a social worker arrived at the foster home to tell
the boys that their
mother was dead. There
was no funeral, no saying good-bye.
Rob and
Clayton were then made Crown wards, eligible for
adoption.
When Rob came to live with us he was living proof of the
years of neglect
and abuse. Rob
was a year behind in school, could barely read, and his
words came out in an almost incoherent jumble of
incomplete thoughts and
parts of sentences.
He was a bundle of raw nerve endings, terrified of doing
something wrong, of being rejected, afraid to try
anything new, reluctant to
give or receive signs of affection and ready to run at
the slightest hint of
disapproval.
I always had the school lunches waiting in the fridge for
the boys to pick up
and put in their bookbags each morning. One particular afternoon, when I
returned home from my morning teaching job, I realized
I’d forgotten to see
to the lunches. I
felt sick, but there was nothing I could do.
I met the
schoolbus when they came home and apologized profusely
about the lunches.
Why, I asked, didn’t you tell me your lunches weren’t
in the fridge? We
thought we’d done something wrong, Rob replied and
couldn’t have any
food.
We live in the country and there was lots of space for
Rob to roam and burn
off energy. Hide-and-seek
was a particularly interesting game to play.
Rob
would run off to hide and not come back. For hours. He
was never far away
- behind the rail fence, in the bushes - but no amount of
calling would bring
him back, not
until he was good and ready. The
game would sort of just,
end.
Our household already included a dog - a big, cuddly
black love machine -
but we added another that the boys could know from a
puppy. Emma, like
Rob, was a roamer. It
was a wet Sunday in late fall when she disappeared
and didn’t come back.
We spent the whole day criss-crossing a muddy
cornfield searching for her.
Great - first thing we do with these fragile kids is
lose their puppy! But
Rob wouldn’t give up. He
stayed outside calling and
calling her name. And
sure enough, up from the cornfield came the
muddiest, wettest puppy - up and straight into his arms.
She was Rob’s dog
from that day on.
Over time and with lots of patience, Rob began to relax
and we started to see
a happy child emerge.
Within a few months of living with us (two teachers -
the poor child!) he was reading on his own and he would
go on to become an
avid reader. Rob
began to enjoy school. He
made lots of friends, played
hockey and soccer and was popular with his classmates and
his teachers.
Then Rob discovered basketball and ‘Life’ began in
earnest. This was
something he was really, really good at - better than
anyone in his whole class
- and he loved it.
At his Grade 8 Graduation, Rob was the recipient of the
Junior Achievement
Award, voted on by all his teachers. He then went on to star on the
cross-country and basketball teams at St. Peter’s High
School -until, that is,
he broke his wrist while perfecting his slam-dunk
technique at the Y.
We were very proud of Rob and his accomplishments.
Most of all, his ability
to overcome the abuse and trauma of his early years.
Rob was developing the
capacity to form healthy and loving relationships and he
cared deeply about
his friends and family, especially his grandmother.
At six feet, he towered
over her, but she claimed a very large space in his
heart. When she moved to
a new home in Peterborough he organized all the kitchen
cupboards so that
the things she used most often would be in easy reach for
her. Rob was 15
when his great-grandmother died.
He insisted on accompanying us to visit
her in hospital, knowing she was dying.
As he grew into his teenage years, Rob told me several
times of bad
memories from his past that had returned to trouble him.
Mom, you don’t
know what I’ve seen, he told me one day. He began to withdraw from us
and, not usual for any teenager, to spend more and more
time away from
home. Still,
we were concerned for him and frustrated by our inability to
help. In
February of 1989, when he left to stay with a friend and failed to
return home, we made the decision not to force him to
come back, but to give
him the space and freedom he seemed to be needing to sort
out his feelings.
We never saw Rob alive again.
Rob was a child that nobody wanted but us.
From his early life of physical
abuse and trauma he had, at 17, created a life of hope
and promise. He was
faithful to the lessons we wanted him to learn about
loyalty and friendship,
about standing up for what is right. . .
too faithful.
On February 28, 1989, Rob, and his good buddy Frankie
were murdered by
David Coon, a young man who already had a lengthy history
of trouble with
the law as a young offender, and to whom they had offered
friendship. With
no empathy whatsoever for his victims, he held a rifle to
their heads and
pulled the trigger because, as he said so eloquently,
‘They pissed me off.’
That was the last day of the life I used to live.
By 3 AM the next morning, I
was sitting in the back of a police cruiser, in the dark,
waiting for my
husband to come back and tell me that the body he had
gone to identify was
not Rob’s, but I knew that it was. We were driven back to Peterborough by a
very kind OPP officer and by dawn were waiting alone for
a reasonable hour
to begin telephoning relatives and friends so that they
would not learn of
Rob’s murder on the news.
I did not collapse or become hysterical. I didn’t
cry. My
brain was trying to deal with what had happened but the messages
weren’t getting through.
I remember feeling alone and afraid and I wanted to
run away.
By the end of that day I was overwhelmed by the kindess
of neighbours,
friends, parents of the children I had been teaching in
Douro. My kitchen
was full of food and the doorbell rang constantly.
We could not make funeral
arrangements until Rob’s body was released by the
police and when we did,
it seemed as if the whole city had come to the funeral
home. The media in
Peterborough were generally respectful of our privacy,
but imagine seeing
your son’s picture on ‘The National’ as a murder
victim? Thank heavens for
shock - it just wouldn’t sink in.
Because the murder investigation did not centre around
us, our next contacts
with the police were by telephone. It was a week before we met the
investigating officers.
We gave a statement and tentatively asked a few
questions, not knowing what information we were allowed
to have about our
own son’s death. We
had lost our rights to be Rob’s parents.
Even his dead
body was no longer under our care and control.
Although Rob’s murderer confessed within an hour of the
murders, with his
victims’ blood on his hands, it was several years
before he was convicted,
years in which I learned the truth about the
‘justice’ system in Canada, its
institutionalized disregard for victims and just how
little a life is worth. The
son I loved had become a piece of evidence in a game of
legal arguments
refereed by various judges in numerous courthouses
throughout Ontario.
Slowly, through evidence presented at a hearing to
transfer the ‘offender’ to
adult court and during the trial itself, I learned the
story of what had
happened to my son.
It was the afternoon of February 28, 1989.
Rob and Frankie were returning
home after school. They
got off the school bus and then drove a mile or so in
an old car to Frankie’s house.
The ground was snow-covered and it was
snowing lightly as they left their shoes just inside the
door, their bookbags in
the kitchen and headed downstairs to their bedrooms.
What they did not
know was that David Coon, a fellow student at St.
Peter’s, a friend of Rob
and Frankie’s and one-time boyfriend of Frankies’
sister Michelle was in the
house, and that he was armed with a 22, stolen from his
father.
Frankie went first - down the stairs, along the hallway
and into his room.
Rob followed, turning right, towards the darkened room,
at the bottom of the
stairs. As
he turned, he was shot through the upper body.
The bullet
punctured a lung and lodged in his back. Rob fell, first against a cupboard
door, knocking it from its track, then onto the floor.
Frankie, hearing the
noise and terrified by what had happened, ran down a side
hallway seeking to
escape through a door to the outside. Unfortunately, he had nailed this door
shut a few days before, afraid that David Coon, who had
been threatening
him at school, intended to break into the house to
ransack it. Frankie was
trapped in a small bathroom.
Coon put a rifle was to the centre of Frankie’s
forehead and pulled the trigger.
He would later say that Frankie slid down to
the floor ‘like a bag of wet shit.’ With Frankie collapsed on the floor, Coon
ejected the used cartridge and shot him again, from
point-blank range,
through the temple.
Then he turned the light on in the bathroom, went back
to where Rob was lying and again, from point-blank range,
put a bullet into
his temple. He
then dragged Rob into a darkened room and shoved him
partially under a bed.
Michelle would be home soon.
She would look for the boys.
She would go
downstairs and follow the light.
. . . to the
bathroom. .
. to her brother.
She would learn the consequences of saying ‘no’ to
David Coon.
If society is afraid of me as a victim, it may be because
I am a witness to this:
that a vicious and brutal 17-year -old psychopath
carefully planned and
plotted to murder; put a gun against the head of a friend
and, pulling the
trigger, felt a rush, and did it again and again.
. .
and again.
Rob fought back. He
had fibres from the jeans of his killer under his
fingernails and gunpowder on his hands from the muzzle of
the rifle that was
pressed against his head.
His brutal execution cannot be explained, or
excused, or made to go away.
It is evil. How can
I not be enraged?
So, please don’t tell me to calm down. Don’t tell me to put it behind me and
get on with my life.
Don’t tell me I need to find ‘closure’, to ‘forgive’.
Don’t tell me it is God’s will, for if it is, I want
no part of your God.
Grief caused by the death of a child is unbearably
painful. Grief that is
complicated by the knowledge that Rob’s death was
deliberately inflicted is
beyond endurance. I
know that Rob was deliberately terrorized, that he had
pain deliberately inflicted upon him. What horrors did he experience before
his death?
During most of the court proceedings I watched from a
place outside my own
body (a classic symptom, I now know, of post-traumatic
stress). I listened to
the sounds of the bullet fragments taken from Rob’s
head as the plastic
bottles containing them were shown to the jury.
I saw and heard graphic
forensic evidence while the defense lawyer laughed,
saying he was glad he
hadn’t had breakfast.
And I watched as this man and other strangers
examined the clothes Rob wore at his death.
I listened to gruesome testimony
while sitting only a few feet from my son’s murderer.
If a gun had been
placed in my hands.
. .
at that moment. .
. I would have watched myself
pull the trigger.
On March 20, 1992, David Coon was convicted in adult
court on two counts
of first degree murder.
At no time was any evidence presented in his
defense. Instead,
a plan of delay was instituted and continued from July
1989, to June 1992 to stall for time until amendments to
the Young
Offenders Act could be enacted that would shorten his
parole eligibility time.
The Crown and the Judge at the transfer hearing were
aware of and complicit
in this plan. We
were told nothing - not until this information became the
subject of yet another stalling-for-time pre-trial motion
I was in Peterborough County Court House the day the bill
passed the Senate
and the three years of delay finally paid off.
Laughter, congratulations and
‘high-five’ signs were exchanged between the offender
and his lawyers in
open court in full view of the victims’ families.
On June 1, 1992, David Coon was sentenced to life with a
parole eligibility
of ten years - and a 10 year ban on firearms.
His final appeal was dismissed
by the Supreme Court of Ontario in 1997 ending a process
that had taken 8
years.
That same year, David Coon submitted an application for
day parole. He has
been eligible for full parole since March 2, 1999.
Our focus now shifts to the National Parole Board.
It is up to us to contact
the Board, to let them know that we want to be notified
of parole dates. We
are entitled to no information whatsoever regarding Mr.
Coon’s progress
within the prison system whether good or bad.
This year alone, there have
been four parole hearing dates set and then cancelled
after we have made
reservations and organized days off to travel to
Montreal. Recently, the NPB
has allowed victims to read prepared statements at parole
hearings (although
there is no financial assistance provided to help victims
travel to hearings)
and claims to be undertaking victim sensitivity training
for its workers. The
last parole hearing date that we were given was 1PM,
September 11, 2002.
One wonders at the sensitivity training behind that
choice of date.
Throughout it all, I look for someone to blame.
I blame myself for letting
Rob go, for not forcing him to come home, for not
protecting him. for still
being alive when he is dead.
I blame the justice system or failing to protect
him. I blame
God for betraying my trust, However,
if I seek to lay the blame
where it really belongs, on the person who murdered my
son, then I have
crossed the last taboo.
My anger is called ‘vengeance’ and my desire for
justice, ‘revenge’.
If you can imagine such a monstrous thing as the murder
of your child, where
would you turn for help?
Even if you have large support network and family
and friends, they themselves will be traumatized - and
none of them have any
knowledge of police procedures, of the court system, or
of the mental,
physical and emotional impact of violent crime.
Neither, in my case, did my
doctor, clergy, nor any counselors I sought out in
Peterborough.
I felt as if I was hanging by my fingernails from edge of
a cliff. At the
bottom of that cliff was a dark, empty void - of evil.
Many kind and
well-meaning people came by with offers of sympathy and
concern. One
doctor encouraged me to try harder to pull myself up.
You’ll get over it, she
said. No
need to refer me to a psychiatrist.
Just forget about it, said another
physician. Don’t
go to the trial if it bothers you, he said.
You’ve got to get
rid of this anger, a priest friend told me.
It’s not good for you. Maybe
so,
but sometimes it’s all that I’ve got.
Well, when you’re hanging from a cliff by your
fingernails, what you could
"really" use is a hand - a strong hand - that
will grasp yours firmly, and not
let go, not ever, until you’re safely on solid ground
again. When that hand
was extended, it belonged to a family member.
And the four of us - myself,
my husband, my mother and my sister have been alone to
hold each other up.
Because crime victims have been so deeply traumatized, we
tend to be
passive, to protect what is left of ourselves, to avoid
being wounded yet
again. Shock
can numb and protect us from the full impact of reality, but it
can also leave us immobile and ineffective at
decision-making.
Those few who have the courage or the compulsion to speak
out publicly can
be patronized,
blamed for their own misfortune, rejected as
vengeance-seekers, or simply ignored once the
headline-grabbing facts of the
crime have been published.
It is as if society wants us to say that everything is
really all right, that the
system has worked, that it’s okay to relax and feel
safe again. Victims know
that the system does not protect us, that no-one is ever
really safe, that
everything is not all right and that, for them at least,
it will never be all right
again. And
yet we go on.
Not long ago, I had a discussion with a friend regarding
the work I was doing
in promoting victim rights’. He expressed reluctance.
It wasn’t right, he said,
that victims should be taking over the justice system,
deciding the outcomes
of criminal cases, determining sentences for offenders.
On that, we agreed.
But, I asked, did he think a victim of sexual assault
should have to wait
outside a courtroom in a narrow hallway surrounded by the
family and
supporters of her attacker?
Should a victim be forced to confront the offender’s
family/friends/lawyer
simply to use the courthouse washroom?
Should a victim be pressured to forgive so that the
offender can feel better
about what he/she has done?
Should victims of crime not be entitled to accurate
information about the
justice system and what they can reasonably expect from
it?
Should they not be entitled to dignity and respect?
To have their voices
heard?
And what about adequate medical care? Care that that at the very least does
no harm?
If we as a society can find the compassion to assist
those who commit violent
crimes, how can we, in justice, deny equal support to
their victims?
I would like to end with a poem that was written by a
neighbour and given to
us after Rob’s death.
To Rob on Eagles’ Wings
cedar rails make good settin’s
on a Fall day
it’s easy to stoop and pick the golden shaft
that makes listening so enjoyable
you told me your life
but at a distance
with no pain
‘cause you didn’t need the answers
just talk
and settin’
and watching evening roll around
you graced our lives
even in chance meetings
always a smile
always much respect
you left us with more than we had
before you came
and now you’re gone
we sat among your friends
(and someone should say how we all felt proud of them)
listening
but each answering his own invitation
each his own message
each his own memory
achh, we miss you son
brother friend
and my rails will want the settin’
and I the listening
but go
let him bear you up
on eagles’ wings
the rails and I can wait
Editor's Note:
Post Script.... Marie and her husband have been called more than
three times, by the Parole Board, since presenting this talk. They
have been informed of Parole Hearings that were take place in Cowansville,
Que. for David Coon, the murderer of their
son. Some of the Hearings were cancelled at the last minute by the
Offender, other times because of weather or other circumstances it was
called off at the last minute. In the January Hearing Mr.
Coon
was refused a temporary day release. It is apparent in Marie's
assessment that this
young man has not changed at all. The fright continues as the same
individual is due for a Parole Hearing in September of 2004.
Each time
Marie and her husband traveled
to the Parole
Hearing it costs them in time, money and emotional taxation. There is little in place to support
Victims of Crime at this time. Early in
2006 changes were brought about to make it possible to pay for the
travel costs for people like Marie and her husband.