PART 11
December 17, 2008 Ottawa Sun
By MARK BONOKOSKI, Sun Media
When Martin Blackwind wound up dying in custody from a self-inficted wound at Warkworth Penitentiary — his history dark, sordid, suicidal and murderous — Corrections Canada issued a news release that seemed almost clinical in its portrayal of a textbook response.
It told of how guards responded to an emergency cell alarm at 2:40 a.m. back on Oct. 3, 2006, how Martin Blackwind was discovered with “potentially life-threatening injuries,” and how an ambulance was called “immediately.”
It was all a crock.
What really happened, in truth, was quite the opposite.
Four veteran jail guards had let Martin Blackwind bleed out in his cell.
An ambulance was not called until 10 minutes after the first staff member looked in on Blackwind, blood pulsating from his left arm, his brachial artery slashed. And, in the 30 minutes it took for the ambulance to arrive, no one moved a muscle.
No one administered first aid to stem the gusher. In fact, no one even talked to Blackwind, let alone check his wound, and that was despite his pleas for help.
When paramedics finally arrived at the rural prison, they found Blackwind alone on the floor of his cell, unconscious and not breathing, and his mattress soaked in blood.
Before he was hauled off to Campbellford Memorial Hospital, where he was later pronounced dead officially, those four veteran jail guards did only one thing.
They shackled the dead man in leg irons.
The extent of their punishment for letting Martin Blackwind die before their turned-away eyes? A dock in pay ranging from 10 to 20 days.
In a report released in May, federal prison ombudsman Howard Sapers issued a scathing report on Martin Blackwind’s death — although Blackwind was not named — and lambasted the correctional system for again falling short of its mandate of preserving life, for excessive delays in the investigation process, and for its systemic discrimination when it comes to aboriginal inmates.
There is no question Martin Blackwind would elicit little or no sympathy, despite Sapers stating that “his death can only be described as tragic.”
If anyone personified the stereotypical image of the “drunken Indian,” this 52-year-old Native originally from the Sioux Village Reserve in Portage la Prairie, Man., was that stereotype, and demonstratively more — a homeless, Listerine-swilling alcoholic-since-childhood who slept on a hot-air vent in downtown Toronto and who, for the second time in his life, had killed the woman who shared his lifestyle, his addiction and his squalor.
A so-called “survivor” of the residential school system, born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorder, an alcoholic himself at the age of 8, a then 22-year-old Martin Blackwind killed his first lover back in 1976 — choking a drunken, 18-year-old Joanne Bohpa to death as she slept.
He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and got 10 years.
His probation officer wrote back then that he was “nearly beyond rehabilitation.”
Then, in 2000, Martin Blackwind pleaded guilty to the manslaughter death of 35-year-old Kathleen Hart, his equally homeless companion who he routinely brutalized during their tumultuous nine-year relationship.
A picture of her taken as evidence by police shows some of that brutality.
Martin Blackwind, court was told, had clubbed her to death as she slept with a nine-kilo piece of scaffolding, and was later picked up by police after a pedestrian noticed him loading Kathleen Hart’s body into a trolley cart, his breath reeking of cheap booze and mouthwash.
His mug shot tells his story, both in years and in miles.
Martin Blackwind didn’t like himself much either.
On three documented occasions, in fact, he attempted suicide. On the fourth, six years into his sentence, guards at Warkworth now stand accused by the federal prison ombudsman of letting it happen — their penalty, when all said and done, some 10 to 20 days pay.
Why did they allow Blackwind to bleed to death?
According to Sapers’ report, and the investigators he sent into Warkworth, racism was one of the answers.
“The allegations of discrimination were serious and require attention,” Sapers’ report stated, indicating that an aboriginal awareness and sensitivity program should be made mandatory for all Corrections personnel in order to “reach what is likely a small number of staff who are resistant to change in this area.”
This is not new.
Back in 2006, Howard Sapers, in his annual report, called the treatment aboriginal offenders a “national disgrace,” citing routine discrimination in the corrections system where Native offenders were far less likely to get parole or be rehabilitated by their experiences in jail.
The challenges faced by aboriginal people in Canadian jails amounts to “a national disgrace,” he said.
“There has been no measurable improvements in the conditions for aboriginal offenders during the last 20 years,” Sapers told a news conference in Ottawa.
As with all in-custody deaths, inquests are mandatory. The inquest into the death of Martin Blackwind was originally scheduled for June but, with the bombshell dropped by Howard Sapers in May, it was postponed.
According to a spokesman for the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario, it has yet to be rescheduled.
And no timeline has been established.
Tomorrow: Corrections ombudsman