The corrosive strain of living through the lawless native occupation around David Brown's house in Caledonia betrayed itself in dramatic fashion: sitting in his underwear at his kitchen table with a shotgun held between his knees, keeping watch in the dark during another fearful, sleepless night, he dozed off, his hand slipping down the gun's barrel and hitting the trigger, court heard yesterday.
A blistering explosion from the gun firing roused him.
"During this time I was afraid to go to sleep," he said.
"I really thought I was going to die, that they were going to do something to us. I was in total panic mode every single day -- and night was worse.
"I dozed off for a second," he said. "I blew a hole through my kitchen ceiling."
Mr. Brown was the first witness in a $7-million lawsuit filed by himself, his wife, Dana Chatwell, and her teenaged son, Dax, against the Ontario Provincial Police and the province for not protecting them during an ongoing native occupation.
The often-violent confrontations started in earnest on April 20, 2006, when the OPP raided a 70-acre site, which was being developed into a residential subdivision, to eject natives two months after they first occupied it to protest land-claim grievances.
Hundreds of natives from a nearby reserve returned to the site that day, many of them masked and armed with bats, axes and hockey sticks.
The natives repelled the police, reclaimed the site and set up roadblocks along the access street, trapping the Brown house, the only home on the native side of the barricade. Court heard earlier that OPP officers would not breach the native's barricade, even in the face of frantic 9-1-1 phone calls.
Justice Thomas Bielby witnessed the seeming manifestation of his strain firsthand, yesterday, as Mr. Brown broke down on the witness stand.
With his face growing red, his eyes welling with tears and his hand yanking at his collar to loosen his tie, he paused several times to compose himself. "I'm getting sweaty palms right now just thinking about it," Mr. Brown said. "I did not know fear in my life until April 20.
"Our life just turned around," he said. "We had to move our son out of the house to live with another family for six weeks."
The native protesters decided when he could come and go from his own home, even issuing him a "passport," he said.
His description of seeing his wife, who had started an in-home hair salon business that was now in ruins, with her "head bent over, rocking back and forth asking God why her son could not live with her," prompted several spectators to leave the courtroom in tears.
"We never knew what tomorrow would bring us ... not knowing what would happen next ... getting threatened every day," he said.
At the height of the reclamation by the natives, the area around his home resembled a war zone, he said.
"You could see smoke in every direction."
Hundreds of tires were dropped across the highway, doused with gasoline and lit; a wooden bridge over railway tracks was set ablaze and allowed to burn to the ground because the fire chief did not feel the OPP could protect his men if they turned their hoses on against native orders; boxes of documents were hauled from the developer's office inside a model home on the site and tossed into a bonfire.
Mr. Brown testified he was repeatedly threatened, his property stolen, his free passage halted, his family subjected to loud intimidation and harassment throughout the nights. Rocks and mud were thrown at them and their home, he said.
None of it provoked any response by the OPP, he said.
And yet, when he returned home late from a company trip to watch the Toronto Blue Jays, he was denied access to his home by protesters who said he was in breach of a curfew. He refused to leave and carried on toward his home, where his wife was, only to be confronted by masked and aggressive natives, he said.
He said he was told by one, who described himself as the security chief, to get in his Jeep or his colleagues would beat him. The security chief drove him back to the OPP and told the officers to get him out of there or there would be a "bigger problem," Mr. Brown said.
The OPP arrested Mr. Brown and kept him in a police cell overnight without being charged.
"These people were walking the road, blowing everything up -- and I get thrown in jail for trying to go home," Mr. Brown said.
Seeing that the OPP would never come to his aid, he stayed awake at night watching with his border collie and his shotgun, he said.
"I would do everything I could to try to stay awake. I did drugs -- I'll admit -- I took cocaine ... pills of ephedrine ... coffee, tea ... hundreds and hundreds of [pills], thousands, just to stay awake at night," he said.
"Throughout the course of this madness," Mr. Brown said, "we had no police; no law enforcement whatsoever."
While the testimony yesterday sharply focused on the claims of the personal toll on a man and his family, the wider implications of the case could not be missed.
Mr. Brown's description of the occupation by the natives as "a military presence" comes after Crown lawyer David Feliciant said that the case "must be understood against the backdrop of the unique character of aboriginal occupations and protests."
And as if to add to the intrigue, a man at the back corner of the public gallery sat writing in a note pad through the testimony. After court ended, in conversation with a reporter, he said his role was to "take notes" but declined to say who they were for.
"I've been instructed not to say."