Eyes filling with tears of shame, Caledonia resident Dave Brown yesterday told an Ontario Superior Court judge how in the spring of 2006, he sat night after night in his underwear, a shotgun between his legs, braced to defend his family during the sometimes violent native occupation of disputed land cheek-by-jowl with his home.
"I didn't know fear in my life until April 20," Mr. Brown said, referring to the day of a failed police raid in which the OPP were driven off the development then known as Douglas Creek Estates while native protesters who had been occupying the land for the two months previous furiously threw up makeshift barricades, blocking two public roads with piles of burning tires, loads of gravel and a jackknifed tractor trailer, effectively turning Mr. Brown and his family into their prisoners.
The OPP never returned to the disputed land, basically ceding it to the Six Nations occupiers until the Ontario government bought out the developer in July for about $12-million and let the status quo stand.
"When the barricades went up and we had no police," Mr. Brown said, "I really thought I was going to die. I really thought they were going to do something to us."
It was when the 42-year-old former heavy equipment operator was describing how he and wife Dana Chatwell had to ship out their teenage son, Dax, to live with another family for six weeks that Mr. Brown's shaky composure crumbled.
"Our life just turned around," he said. "I was watching my wife, with no job after all the work she did [Ms. Chatwell had just opened up a hair salon after a $30,000 renovation to the basement of their house], bent over like she was hemorrhaging, asking God why her son couldn't live with her."
Outside, chanting and drumming from the protesters was relentless, he said, threats and trespassing onto his property a daily occurrence, and with much of the most overt lawlessness - among the undisputed incidents, natives burned down a wooden bridge, threw a car over an overpass, terrorized anyone who strayed close to the site for a look, including an elderly couple and out-of-town police officers, and damaged a hydro transformer to the tune of $1-million - occurring under the very noses of the police, Mr. Brown became afraid to sleep.
He kept watch every night, his border collie Hunter at his side, the dog pacing and barking, Mr. Brown keeping himself awake with drugs (including cocaine and stimulants) and booze.
"One night," he remembered, "I was falling asleep, dozing off, and my shotgun went off and blew a hole right through the roof.
"Dana took my shells away," he said. "She thought I was going to blow my head off.
"What am I going to do?" he cried. "Call the police? You might as well call Ghostbusters."
As he put it plainly another time, "The OPP were not allowed to go past any barricade. They weren't in charge. The lights were on, but nobody was home." Another time he said, "They're [the natives] in charge. The OPP is not in charge. I'm not in charge of when I go to my own home."
The family is suing the Ontario government and the OPP for $7-million, alleging the police in particular owed them a duty of care, yet all but abandoned them to the protesters.
Mr. Brown was being examined by his own lawyer, John Evans, and under his gentle questioning what emerged was the story of how a ridiculously normal, small-town Ontario family - Mr. Brown was a social animal known as "the Q king" for his many barbecues, desperately proud of his hard-working entrepreneurial wife and of Dax - very nearly came undone while government officials worried about the protest spreading across the country and were thus obsessed with appeasing the native occupiers, and the police turned a blind eye.
Several times, and Mr. Brown named the officers involved, he described incidents in which embarrassed OPP officers apologized to him for the force's lack of action.
One such event was a night in May, 2006, when he was returning from a company excursion to a Blue Jays game in Toronto.
In his innocent delight in all this - the company had rented a limo bus for the employees and laid on beer and a big buffet for them - Mr. Brown revealed a sliver of the man he must have been once, easy to please and joyful, before he was turned into the fellow who says of himself now, "As soon as I look outside, I'm mad, at the day, at myself, at my wife, my son, you [his lawyer], the media. It's been almost four years since we enjoyed our life."
That night, when he arrived at the native run barricade, he was told there was a curfew, and he wouldn't be allowed home.
It was here, routinely, where the protesters kept him waiting, sometimes for 20 minutes, and once, when he dared ask how long this was going to go on, he was told, "As long as it takes. It's been 200 years."
But this night Mr. Brown defied the native orders, found himself surrounded by masked native men on all-terrain vehicles, his wife weeping on the front porch - and ultimately was tossed in jail for the night.
"I just wanted to go home," he said, wonderingly even now. "I just wanted to go home...I was angry to the point - I don't think I was ever as angry in my life...
"My tax dollars paid for that road, I'm supposed to enjoy my house, and my family. I can't believe I'm getting thrown in jail, I'm shaking and pacing." The next morning, he said, a female OPP officer came to let him out, crying and apologizing.
His father came and picked him up. "Did he drive you all the way home?" Mr. Evans asked. "Of course not," said Mr. Brown. "He wasn't allowed there either." They grabbed a coffee at Tim Hortons, and Mr. Brown walked home, past the OPP barricade, where again, as he had for too long now, "watched the OPP watching me.
"That," Mr. Brown reminded his lawyer, "was only the first two weeks" after the barricades went up. They would not come down for another two.
The trial continues today.