September 16, 2009

By Bob Mionske

A swift public relations campaign couldn’t save a successful Canadian lawyer from the fact that he ran down and killed a bike messenger.

He was Metis , one of the officially recognized aboriginal peoples of Canada. He was the oldest of eight children, and at the age of six he had been adopted by a foster family, together with his four-year old brother, because their mother struggled with an alcohol addiction. “We just grew up with poverty, with nothing,” his younger brother, now serving time for drug trafficking at Stony Mountain Prison, near Winnipeg, noted. “We probably had one of the hardest lives growing up. A lot of foster homes. Broken-down families.” As a young man, the older of the two adopted boys had gotten into trouble with the law over some bad checks, and had left his home town for a new life in Toronto, where he struggled with his own addiction to alcohol. For a time, he was living on the streets, homeless, but for the past several years the avid cyclist had worked as a bicycle courier.

Read the full blog