Dave Brown was afraid to sleep at night lest something happen to his family during the tense standoff between the OPP and native protesters who occupied the former Douglas Creek Estates.
The Caledonia man, whose home bordered the occupied former development property and was inside the native barricades on Argyle Street South, took the witness box yesterday in Superior Court in Hamilton.
Brown, 42, his wife, Dana Chatwell, 45, and their son, Dax Chatwell, 18, have filed a $7-million lawsuit against the Ontario government and Ontario Provincial Police for abuse of power and neglect of duty.
Brown said his family watched in horror from their back deck -- "spitting distance" from the pitched battle taking place next door -- as nearly 200 OPP officers in assault gear were swarmed and overwhelmed by a thousand or more native protesters wielding hockey sticks, bats and two-by-fours.
Within hours of the failed OPP raid that morning of April 20, 2006, Brown said, protesters were engaging in extreme acts of lawlessness, including smashing police vehicles, assaulting officers, barricading the town's main thoroughfare, pouring gasoline and setting fire to several hundred tires on Argyle Street at the Sixth Line, burning and destroying a wooden bridge on Stirling Street over the CN rail line, setting brush fires and tossing a vehicle off an overpass onto the Caledonia bypass.
Police took no further steps to curb the protesters after their raid failed. Brown said natives wearing balaclavas and camouflage outfits took over the main street from the entrance to the disputed land to the Sixth Line. He said they drove their trucks and cars up and down the highway, waving flags of the Mohawk Warriors and the Haudenosaunee/Six Nations Confederacy.
Throughout this period, said Brown, the OPP turned their backs and pretended not to see or hear the threats and acts of intimidation perpetrated against his family by the protesters, including taunts to get off "their land" or they would burn Brown's house next.
The family was issued a roadblock passport by Brian Skye, whom Brown identified as the head of the protesters' security unit. The family was not permitted to come or go from their home except with permission of natives stationed at two checkpoints on the road. They were trapped in a no man's land without bus service, mail delivery or garbage pickup, Brown said.
Their day-to-day life often felt like the Twilight Zone and their nights were filled with anxiety and fear. Hunter, the family's border collie, barked incessantly whenever a native trespassed on their property. The family lay awake at night listening to the sounds of shouting, chanting and drumming. At regular intervals, a truck would drive by on a perimeter check and shine a bright spotlight on their house.
After weeks of living under these conditions, Brown was sleep-deprived and exhausted but dared not fall asleep in case the protesters made good on their threat to set fire to his house.
"What was I going to do, call the police?" Brown asked Justice Thomas Bielby. "I might as well call Ghostbusters."
Many nights, Brown said, he sat at his kitchen table in the dark wearing just his underwear and with a shotgun braced between his legs.
"I was in total panic mode every single day and it was worse at night. I sat there one night and I was starting to fall asleep ... I just dozed for a second and my hand must have slid down and hit the trigger. The gun went off and I blew a hole in my kitchen ceiling."
He said native protesters at the barricades would sometimes demand he open his trunk and would confiscate groceries and beer.
"He makes me open my trunk. I turn around and I look at this OPP officer (standing nearby at the police barricade) and I say: 'Isn't that your job?'
"He just looked the other way. I think they were embarrassed," Brown said of the police.
The plaintiff's testimony continues today.