“Nothing’s the same as it was before,” says Jenni Wannamaker, not far from the waters of the Bay of Quinte where she lost her brother 10 years ago.
Wannamaker lives in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, about 220 kilometres southwest of Ottawa.
For the past decade, the First Nation has been grappling with the sudden deaths and subsequent police investigations of Wannamaker’s brother, 26-year-old Matty Fairman, and Tyler Maracle, 21.
In the early hours of April 26, 2015, Fairman and Maracle set out on the bay to do some spearfishing, but they never returned home.
There followed a community-wide search and an investigation that was initially led by Tyendinaga Mohawk Police before being handed over to Ontario Provincial Police (OPP).
According to OPP records, fishers found the bodies of Maracle and Fairman nearly two weeks later, about 15 metres apart. Their boat was found at the bottom of the bay the day after, connected to 274 metres of net full of rotting fish.
At the time, investigators concluded the young men had cut the net, which police believed belonged to another member of the community, and tried to haul the fish into their boat, overloading the vessel and causing it to sink — and the two men to drown.
The coroner’s office classified their deaths as accidental.
‘They weren’t thieves’
But the families of Fairman and Maracle have long rejected the police theory about the circumstances of their deaths.
“There was no way,” said Wannamaker. “Matty and Tyler were smart. They learned how to fish a long time ago.”
She said the only reason they went out that day was to show some boys in the neighbourhood how to properly clean fish.
“They wanted to do something good. They weren’t thieves,” she insisted.
For years, Maracle’s mother Tammy protested outside the police station, calling for the case to be reopened. She believes her son and his friend may have been victims of foul play.
“I just kept fighting and fighting and fighting,” she said.
That fight has finally paid off.
Case reopened after APTN investigation
Last month, following an investigation by the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN), OPP reopened the case.
Investigators first had to exhume the boat — APTN reported it had been buried according to a claimed Mohawk tradition — then load it with more than twice the weight of the fish believed by police to have been in the net when the men drowned, to see how it fared in various scenarios.
The boat never sank. A followup study ordered by the coroner confirmed the results.
“From the conditions outlined in this report it can be safe to assume that the vessel was not overloaded at the time of sinking,” concludes a report from BYD Naval Architects.
The report also noted the boat was found with concrete blocks and more fishing net aboard, all intact.
“Equipment was found on the benches and interior of the vessel in what seemed an undisturbed state, which seems to suggest that the descent to the lake bed was relatively flat,” the report concluded.
It offered several other possibilities for what may have happened that morning, but dismissed them all as unlikely — except for one.
“The vessel was affected by an external force and one or both gentlemen ended up in the water,” according to the report.
That external force — or perhaps an attempt by both men to clamber back aboard from the same side of the boat — could have caused it to take on water. However, according to the authors, “there is not enough evidence or signs of this occurring on the vessel at the time of the survey.”
Cause of deaths now ‘undetermined’
Regardless, the findings prompted Ontario’s chief coroner to reclassify the deaths from accidental to undetermined.
“Which means we don’t actually know what happened,” Dr. Dirk Huyer said. “We always are open to hearing and considering new information or information that might be different than what we found during our earlier investigations.”
OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique has ordered the case to be reopened, this time under the lead of the Toronto Police Service (TPS).
“We respect the Toronto Police Service’s process and await their results, following which we will identify any necessary next steps based on their findings,” Carrique said in a statement to CBC.
The TPS confirmed it’s conducting a review of the investigation at the request of provincial police.
A painful 10 years
The families of Maracle and Fairman have now been given new reason to hope they may finally get answers about what happened to their loved ones.
But their loss — and their belief that police mishandled the initial investigation — has taken a tremendous toll.
“It’s been a living hell. There’s times when I didn’t want to be here, and there’s actually times I tried not to be here,” said Fairman’s mother Beverly Maracle.
“How do you move on without your baby?”
Tammy Maracle said she and her husband Robin feel the same way without their son.
“I would lay in bed just thinking, like, ‘Who do I go to? Who will help me?'” she recalled.
On the cusp of a new investigation, Maracle said she’ll be watching police closely.
“I hope … they get justice for us. But if they don’t, I’ll be back out there again,” she said.
