Barbara Brown
The Hamilton Spectator
(Dec 3, 2009)
Dana Chatwell was angry and fierce in her determination not to let the truck full of men -- their faces covered with bandanas and balaclavas -- see that she was afraid.
The vehicle pulled up outside her Caledonia home on Oct. 18, 2006, about five months after native protesters had taken down the barricades near their house on Argyle Street South. Chatwell and a female friend were alone, as her husband, Dave Brown, and son, Dax Chatwell, were away for the night.
Chatwell, 46, testified yesterday in Superior Court in Hamilton, where her family has filed a $ 7 million lawsuit against the OPP and province, claiming they lived under siege and were abandoned to a state of lawlessness after native protesters occupied the former Douglas Creek Estates in February that year.
The plaintiff said she tossed her phone to her friend and told her to call the police. Dressed only in her neon-green Mickey Mouse pyjamas, she picked up a baseball bat and stormed outside.
"Get off my property!" she roared at the men.
A second truck arrived, which also carried six men in army fatigues with their faces covered.
"I said to my girlfriend, 'Did you call the police? Did you call the police?'"
The OPP never did show up that night, said Chatwell, although they called back a couple of hours later to see if the women were all right.
Chatwell said she had to swallow her fear and run the trespassers off her property herself.
"I think I called them a bunch of cowards. I called them every name in the book. But I know I called them cowards, with their masks over their faces," she told Superior Court Justice Thomas Bielby.
Chatwell testified about nights lying awake on her couch -- too afraid to go to bed -- and listening to the noise from the occupied property, including whooping, shouting, drumming, chanting, trucks and ATVs being driven wildly in all directions. The protesters would shine headlights and spotlights on her house, lighting it up like a circus tent.
She said OPP maintained a hands-off policy when it came to the land claim dispute. They would not investigate or enter the DCE to charge a protester with mischief or trespass to her property, theft or for any of the barrage of threats to do harm to her family, to take over their property or burn down their house.
Chatwell was born in Caledonia and grew up in a blended family of six girls, of whom three were half native. She and Brown bought their house on Argyle Street, which borders the DCE on two sides, from her stepfather in August 2005.
In August 2006, they got a letter from Pilot Insurance Co. of Toronto, advising them of a number of "changes" and "enhancements" to their policy. In particular, it would "no longer insure damage caused by fire resulting from a terrorist act."
On Dec. 17, she and Brown returned home to find their pet border collie limping and evidently injured, and every room in their house ransacked. Computers and electronics were trashed, upholstered furniture ripped, china smashed and intruders had sliced their mattresses and urinated on their bedding. The walls were covered with graffiti referring to the homeowners as "white trash," "pigs" and "racists," among more obscene epithets.
The OPP investigated Chatwell, Brown and their teenage son, accusing them of vandalizing their own home, in order to cast suspicion on the native occupiers next door. But police did agree to install video surveillance cameras on exterior doors and an internal security alarm.
The family moved out of the house for a while and took a vacation. On Jan. 9, 2007, Chatwell returned from her job as a hairdresser in town to find her husband, an OPP officer, who was also their friend, and a real estate agent sitting at her kitchen table.
Her husband told Chatwell that the OPP had secretly installed a hidden video camera in the kitchen, above the refrigerator, and aimed it at the couple's kitchen table.
"I just flipped," said Chatwell. "I was screaming and yelling, 'What the hell is a hidden camera doing in my house?' It was like we were the criminals. I really felt like they (the police) were watching us."
The trial continues.