The Labour Day weekend Sunday is considered cursed by many from James Smith Cree Nation.
Not only is it the day in 2022 that Myles Sanderson went on a murderous rampage through the community, killing 11 people and leaving 17 injured, but exactly one year prior, it was the day another young man shot and killed two residents and injured a third. Both incidents are believed to have involved drug use.
As the one-year anniversary of one of Canada’s worst mass killings inches closer, victims and survivors are still struggling to come to terms with the grief and trauma left by Sanderson, who later died in police custody. For many, that grief is compounded by the tragedy that struck a year prior, with the knowledge that the preliminary trial for 35-year-old Shawn Moostoos, the accused in the double homicide, is currently underway in Melfort Provincial Court. And for a few James Smith residents, who were caught up in both killings, the timing is almost too much to bear.
“I am traumatised, yes I am,” Arlene Moostoos, Shawn’s mother and one of Sanderson’s victims, tells Global News. She has never spoken publicly about either of the attacks.
“But I’ve got to stop feeling sorry for myself. I have to get back to living, for my kids and for my grandkids.”
Moostoos is facing two counts of first-degree murder, one count of attempted murder, and one count of discharging a firearm with intent to endanger life. Arlene says the man that Moostoos is accused of killing was his older brother. He is also accused of killing his brother’s fiance.
Like Sanderson, she says Moostoos was long consumed by drug addiction that altered his life and led him down the wrong path.
“He couldn’t handle the stress of going to work, he needed something for energy and that’s how it started,” Arlene says.
One year after double homicide and Moostoos went to prison, Arlene and her son Creedon DiPaolo were targeted by Myles Sanderson as he went from house to house, stabbing and killing people after a weekend of selling drugs around the community. Creedon was stabbed nine times; Arlene seven.
To make matters worse, she’s just been diagnosed with terminal cancer.
Global News spent four days on James Smith Cree Nation in the lead-up to September 4, spending time with residents. Asked about the significance of the Labour Day weekend on the community, people said the two killings were pure coincidence. But many say unless something is done about drug and alcohol dependency, history could continue to repeat itself.
“It possibly could happen again,” Gerald Whitehead, who works in security for James Smith Cree Nation, says.
“With the copycat attacks recently, we hear that, as security, that the next one is going to be better and more. They’re going to do worse than what happened on September 4.”
Kelly Burns, Myles Sanderson’s half-brother, recently told Global News from prison that the “guilt and shame” he felt over the events on Sept. 4 caused his drug abuse to spiral out of control. He was arrested in early August for an alleged assault and “uttering threats.”
Since 2019, at least 15 people have been deliberately killed on James Smith Cree Nation in incidents that family members say involved substance abuse.
‘Things went downhill really fast’
Moostoos had substance abuse issues since he was young, Arlene says. He pulled himself out of it when he decided he wanted more for his children. He left his wife, who also abused drugs, took his two children, and moved to Melfort, Arlene says.
He met a new girlfriend. They had a couple of children and they married. He was building houses for work and seemed to be making something of himself, she says. But he relapsed. He started taking cocaine, then pills for energy, then meth. He stopped going to work and was staying up “for days and days.”
“Things went downhill really fast,” Arlene says. “My kids tried to hide things but I eventually find out.”
“When he got married, there were so many people there, and so many families. It was such a good time. And then not long after, this horrible thing happened.”
Arlene wishes she knew what happened on September 5, 2021, the night her son is accused of killing his brother. But she has not asked him.
Moostoos was arrested the following day in Melfort.
Shortly after the tragedy, the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) issued a statement claiming that RCMP were warned about Moostoos by James Smith community members. However, spokespeople for FSIN and James Smith did not know who informed the RCMP about Moostoos, and could not answer any questions about that statement.
Global News inquired about Moostoos’ prior convictions with the Melfort Provincial Court and was told Moostoos had about a dozen prior charges. However, because they occurred more than two to three years ago, they could not be gathered in time for this story.
Last week, Arlene was called to give testimony at his preliminary trial, which continues on Sept. 15. She says her six-foot-three son was “skin and bones” when he went into prison, but is now about 300 pounds. She had to take his measurements to go and buy him a suit for his appearance.
“I think I did okay with that,” she smiles, sadly.
“When I testified, he was sitting in the prisoner dock and when I sat down before the judge came in, I told him ‘I love you’. He said ‘I love you too Mum’. I know it must affect him that he took his brother’s life. I have so much fear about how is he going to deal with this.”
Arlene thinks it’s nothing more than a coincidence that Sanderson decided to carry out his attack the exact same day, one year later. She and Creedon were known to Sanderson. In 2017, according to Sanderson’s court files, he threatened death to her and her eldest son, and threatened to burn their house down. Creedon says he was forced to drive the Sanderson brothers around the days before the attacks.
“Another time he [Sanderson] was out on the main road with a gun. I called the police and the police came out. Somebody must have warned them because they drove off before the cops got there,” Arlene says.
“That was one of the things he said to me when he was stabbing me, he was saying ‘Are you going to call the cops again? Are you going to call the cops on me again?’”
It was about 6 am when Sanderson entered Arlene’s house on September 4. She remembers hearing a pounding on the door, before he entered her bedroom and demanded her car keys. One of Arlene’s granddaughters was sleeping in the bed beside her.
“Then he came and sat beside me on the bed and he started talking to me saying ‘Why’d you do that, why’d you do this to me?’ I said ‘Do what?’. He said ‘You did’ and all of a sudden he pulls out this knife.”
“He started stabbing at me. I was saying ‘Ow,ow’ and then he did one big jab to my stomach and he pushed the knife all the way in and I was saying stop please, stop.”
That’s when her son, Creedon, appeared at the door. Sanderson lunged at him, stabbing him several times in the abdomen and stomach, before a wound to the head left Creedon crumpled on the floor. That’s when Sanderson left, Arlene says.
Her grandchildren came into the room after and gave her something to stem the bleeding, but she doesn’t remember what it was, just that she was holding it tightly to her stomach, so “I wouldn’t bleed out.”
Things got “blurry” after that, Arlene says.
She knows she ended up in a Saskatoon hospital. Later, she found out she’d initially been taken to Melfort hospital, but her injuries were so severe she needed to be moved. She says a band member later told her they’d donated her blood so she could be transported.
She spent three weeks in hospital and then lived in a hotel in Saskatoon until shortly before Christmas.
‘I forgive him’
Like many of Sanderson’s victims, Arlene has not been able to go back to work since the attack. She’s tried to go back to her old job working in income assistance in the band office, but says several recent lockdowns due to security incidents in the community have left her traumatized.
“Every weekend comes around and I think I’m going to go back Monday, for sure I’m going to go back Monday. And then Monday comes and I get ready and all of a sudden the fear… I don’t know what it is, I just can’t make it to work.”
On top of that, she lost her husband in 2022. And in June, she was diagnosed with cancer in her lymph nodes.
She still gets up at night to check that all the doors are locked, and keeps her windows closed even on the hottest nights. When she hears loud noises outside she “starts shaking and I go out to see what’s going on.”
Despite it all, she forgives Sanderson.
“I talked to a psychic medium. My husband came through and he told me to start living again… He said ‘don’t be afraid. And your kids and grandkids want you to start living again’. And Myles came through.
“She didn’t say it was Myles but I knew it was him. I told her ‘Tell him I forgive him.’ I know what kind of life he lived, what kind of abuses he went through, I know all that. He never got that chance [to become a good human being]. He had a bad life.”
‘How do we create another lifestyle?’
But 2021 was not the start of a tragic run for James Smith Cree Nation. In 2019, a murder-suicide left the community reeling.
Darryl Burns says his granddaughter Catherine Head was killed by her partner, who was a known drug dealer, in an incident on March 21 of that year. Head was just 18 when she died.
Saskatchewan RCMP declined to provide additional details on the case..
“He got a handgun and he kept playing with it and then he took it out and shot her and shot himself,” Burns says.
“We raised Catherine for five or six years. She was involved in hockey and a really awesome young girl. But it’s not hard for them to fall off the wagon and get into drugs.”
Burns, an addictions counsellor on James Smith Cree Nation, is now leading the charge to try to get people the help they need to cure their addictions and, try to get through to the youth, to teach them other ways of coping with trauma.
“The environment and the culture we have nowadays is all based on that. The children growing up in the community, that’s life for them. So how do we create another lifestyle?”
Burns says he hopes the men in the community will “step up,” so the women stop shouldering the burden.
that All of James Smith’s first responders are women, he says.
Darryl’s sister, Gloria Burns, was a first responder on Sept. 4, and was killed alongside her friend Bonnie Goodvoice-Burns and her son Gregory Burns, while responding to a distress call from them.
A first responder on September 4, who did not want to be named, says she’s frustrated that harsher penalties have not been put in place for those in the community dealing drugs.
“There are no policies in place. Nothing has changed. We are still where we were on September 4,” she says.
Gerald Whitehead, who works in security at James Smith, says drugs are still prevalent, but patterns have changed. With ramped up security patrols since September 4, more people are now going to buy drugs during the day instead of during the night, he says.
Security is “monitoring” the houses where known drug dealers reside, he says, and report to supervisors. He doesn’t know what the process is after that.
“[The drug dealing] was at a standstill for a while there to see what the community was going to do about it, and then it started to pop up again.
“The criminal, the users, seem to have more power than people who don’t, you know, because they know what to say, what to do, how to get out of a situation… how to beat the system.”
Walter Constant, an elder, says James Smith is no longer “safe” and is concerned about the amount of time attached to the federal government’s $62.5 million funding promise, announced late last year.
“What if something happens again, before two years? I think things are moving too slow. Our people are out there asking: help us.”
Recent attempts at “copy-cat attacks,” where, many members of the community told Global News, two local men threatened to “finish the job Myles started” in two separate incidents, have left Whitehead convinced that another fatal incident could be a matter of if, not when.
He says the youth in the community need to “step forward,” because most of the security in the community are over the age of 40 or 50.
“If they don’t step forward, it’s going to be a losing situation again.”
Robert Head, Peter Chapman band chief, says the band’s leadership seemed to be fighting a losing battle.
“The police want to cut the flow of the source of drugs closer to the top, they’re not exactly looking for the guy on the corner.
“It’s hard to convince them that we need these nickel and dime guys brought down so we can sleep at night.”
“We have had warning signs in terms of drugs in the community taking a toll on the young people and taking people’s lives.”
The Moostoos family is testament to that.
Arlene is strictly against drugs, but doesn’t know how to help her children, or the community, stay away from them.
She says her son was a different person when he was clean.
“People that think otherwise of him but to me and his siblings, we’ve always seen Shawn in a different way. He was always kind and good to his kids. Always helping me and his Dad out.
“The devil was at play that night.”
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