OTTAWA – An internal military inquiry into the 2008 suicide of Cpl. Stuart Langridge pins some of the blame on his parents.
On Thursday, Langridge’s parents, Sheila and Shaun Fynes, were given a copy of the Board of Inquiry report that was completed in 2009, a few months after the 28-year-old’s body was found in his Edmonton barracks.
The 104-page report concludes that: “Cpl. Langridge has longstanding personal issues that originated in his childhood and remained with him until his death.
“Cpl. Langridge’s parents divorced when he was five years old and his biological father moved to Ireland shortly after that. By the time he was 12 years old, his father no longer had any contact with Cpl. Langridge,” it says.
“These events had a profound effect on Cpl. Langridge, leaving him full of anger and a sense of abandonment that he was unable to come to terms with.”
Langridge’s parents had been fighting for years to get this report.
READ MORE: Military Police Complaints Commission slams botched military suicide probe
It was finally handed over one day after the Military Police Complaints Commission released a scathing report into the investigation into Langridge’s death, concluding his family was disrespected, ignored and given potentially misleading information.
Having finally read the report, and its conclusion that she and Langridge’s biological father bear much of the blame for his death, Sheila Fynes is furious.
“These gratuitous comments are outside the accepted bounds of humanity, decency and civility,” she said.
“This externally imposed guilt is actuated either by malice or insanity. Either way, we reject the findings of this Board of Inquiry entirely.”
She adds that the military ignores the fact that her son was a veteran of the Bosnian and Afghanistan campaigns, and that in his last two years of military service, he attempted suicide five times.
The lawyer for the Fynes family, Michel Drapeau, is calling on Defence Minister Jason Kenney to apologize for the way the Fynes have been treated by the military, calling it “inhuman and disrespectful.”
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