WARNING: This article contains details of abuse.
Craig Fox shot Lee Bearsears in the back of the head and then dumped his body in a field on Poundmaker Cree Nation.
Now, Fox is waiting to find out how many years he will spend in prison until he’s eligible for parole.
The 29-year-old was convicted of second-degree murder after a trial earlier this year in Battleford Court of King’s Bench.
At Fox’s sentencing hearing last week, Bearsears’s family members talked about the grief, heartbreak and emptiness in their lives after he was murdered on Oct. 15, 2023. Bearsears was 31 years old.
His younger siblings spoke about the role he played in raising them, and said they didn’t know where they’d be without him.
“He helped a lot of us, probably even you. I was mad at you, but now I’m just trying to survive, trying to survive this,” Bearsears’s mother told Fox.
One of his kokums (grandmothers) wrote in her victim impact statement that Bearsears “took care of us all.”
“We trusted, and never for a minute thought you would or could hurt him in this way,” she wrote. “Do you realize what you took from people? Do you realize you had no right to do what you did?”
The murder
Justice Rochelle Wempe’s verdict, issued in May, details what happened on Oct. 15, 2023.
Fox was high on crystal meth and alcohol when he and others spent the day travelling around in Bearsears’s borrowed truck. Around 8 or 9 p.m., they returned to Poundmaker Cree Nation, where Bearsears was waiting.
Fox and a friend, Preston Checkosis, picked up Bearsears. Checkosis was driving, Bearsears was in the front passenger seat and Fox was in the back, behind Bearsears.
Fox held a sawed-off rifle to the back of Bearsears’s head and fired a single shot, intentionally killing him, Wempe found.
Bearsears’s body was then left in a field and his truck was abandoned at a waste transfer station on the reserve.
Evidence at trial that Wempe noted included that Fox’s DNA was found on the action of the rifle and his fingerprints were the only ones found in the passenger area of the vehicle.
Why did Fox kill Bearsears?
Comments Fox made after the shooting were also significant in Wempe’s verdict.
In the hours after shooting Bearsears, Fox went to an aunt’s house on Little Pine First Nation, just west of Poundmaker Cree Nation, where his brother and another cousin were staying. The cousin woke up and talked to Fox.
The cousin testified that when he asked Fox what was going on, Fox said, “We bodied a skinner” three or four times and “I bodied a skinner” one time.
Wempe said there was evidence that “skinner” is a slang term used to describe a child molester. The agreed facts in the trial included that Bearsears had been charged with sexual assault for allegedly inappropriately touching a young person.
Bearsears had pleaded not guilty and had a preliminary hearing scheduled for early 2024. Fox “became aware” of the allegation in September 2023, Wempe noted.
Police also found a message on Fox’s phone sent on Jan. 19, 2024, from his Facebook profile that “stated that he had been sexually assaulted when he was younger and that he would put people who commit sexual assault ‘under the dirt where they belong,'” Wempe said.
Sentencing positions
Second-degree murder carries an automatic sentence of life in prison with no chance of parole for a minimum of 10 years, and a maximum of 25 years.
The Crown argued for a period of parole ineligibility of 15 to 20 years, while the defence argued for 10 years.
In arguing for a lengthier period of parole ineligibility, Crown prosecutor Oryn Holm said Fox engaged in “vigilante justice” and acted as “judge, jury and executioner.”
“Mr. Fox, in some irony, was found guilty after a trial. By his actions, he denied Mr. Bearsears the right to a trial,” Holm said in court.
He said Bearsears had no expectation of violence on the night he died, no chance to defend himself, no chance to flee and his body was then “callously” left in a field.
Holm also referenced Fox’s lengthy criminal record and the fact he was subject to a firearms prohibition when he murdered Bearsears.
Background factors
Defence lawyer Pamela Wayman, who represented Fox alongside Brent Little, argued that Fox’s life “can’t be understood apart from the intergenerational effects of colonial institutions.”
His grandparents and his father attended residential schools and his mother attended a day school, giving rise to the violence and addiction that Fox was then exposed to at a very young age.
Fox “experienced displacement almost from birth,” being placed in foster care as a baby. His childhood was marked by poverty, addiction, violence and severe abuse, Wayman said.
For a period of time, Fox lived with his father in Alberta, but said the abuse he experienced there made it the “worst days of his life.” He repeatedly tried to run away, then ended up being placed in group homes, which Wayman said was a “pathway” to how he became involved with institutions and, subsequently, the justice system.
As a teenager, he disclosed “deeply personal information” to a counsellor in a group home, who then shared that information with staff and others in the home. That breach of trust had “significant consequences” for Fox, Wayman said. He stopped participating in counselling.
With more trustworthy counselling and support, Wayman said, Fox “may have developed healthier ways to manage his trauma and, later, stress.”
He began using alcohol and drugs at a young age, sometimes supplied by older relatives.
All of those background factors — family history of residential school, intergenerational trauma, child welfare removal, separation from siblings and parents, institutional placement, poverty, addiction, childhood victimization, exposure to substances at an early age, disrupted education and early entrenchment in the criminal justice system — don’t excuse the crime or diminish the harm to Bearsears’s family, but must be given weight in sentencing, Wayman said.
When Wempe asked Fox if he had anything he wanted to say, he said he did not.
Wempe said she needed some time to consider the sentence. She is scheduled to give her decision on Sept. 25.
