Homicide detectives make guarantee to families of Mohawk fishermen

Gathered around a table in the garage that Robin Maracle built with his late son Tyler, four members of the Toronto police homicide unit vowed to get to bottom of what happened to his son and friend Matty Fairman whose bodies were pulled from Bay of Quinte more than 10 years ago. “We’re gonna start here from the beginning on everything, there will be no stone unturned. Trust me when I say that just, you know, be hopeful and have faith in us and I guarantee you, we will get to the bottom of it,” Inspector Ted Lioumanis told both of the fishermen’s families during a meeting this past summer in Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, about 200 km east of Toronto. Last spring, the commissioner of the Ontario Provincial Police asked the Toronto Police Service to reinvestigate the deaths of Maracle, 21, and Fairman, 26, after Ontario’s chief coroner changed the manner of deaths in the drownings from accident to undetermined. The change was a result of a two-year investigation by APTN Investigates that proved the police were wrong about how the fishermen’s 14-foot aluminum boat sank in the early morning hours of April 26, 2015. The OPP and Tyendinaga Police Service wrongly assumed Maracle and Fairman overloaded the boat with stolen fish after hauling in another fishermen’s net that was set hours earlier. Police never weighed the fish, nor secured the netting found inside the boat, before the coroner’s office quickly ruled the deaths accidents and the young men as thieves. However, the families never accepted it, especially after their bodies were found a short distance apart 13 days after they disappeared right where police had focused their search, and pushed for years to have the case properly examined. Eight years later, APTN came along and tested the police theory by putting more than 1,500 pounds in the same boat to show it could easily handle the weight without sinking. “We’re not going to adopt what was said by the OPP and we’re not here to put blame on the OPP or anyone else. But we’re not going to be swayed by anything. We’re going to take a look at all the material and we’re going to start from Day 1,” Lioumanis vowed. “I can tell you as the boss, the unit commander of the homicide unit, we have the best unit in the country.” APTN was allowed inside the meeting, which made up part of the latest chapter of the investigative documentary series, Secrets of the Bay, that aired on Oct. 18. Det.-Sgt. Steve Smith asked the families for patience as they do their job. “This isn’t something that is going to happen over a week. This is going to take over a year, a year-and-a-half because we want to do it right. We don’t want to try and rush it. Just cram everyone in and get people in. So step-by-step-by-step,” Smith said. Smith leads the cold case section of the homicide unit and was joined by Det. Erin Benoit and Det. Shona Patterson of the unit’s missing persons’ section. “We know that it’s not easy to trust us. We sit here from Toronto and you’ve never met us. You’ve already been through so much,” said Benoit. But the families assured the detectives that they trust them. “I have more faith in all of you than anyone else that’s ever come along, other than Ken,” said Matty’s sister, Jenni Wannamaker, of APTN’s Kenneth Jackson. The families put their trust in APTN from Day 1. Four members of the Toronto police homicide unit meet with the families of Tyler Maracle and Matty Fairman in Tyendinaga this past summer. They, along with Tyler’s mother, Tammy, far right, listen to Tyler’s father, Robin, off camera, ask a question. Photo: Tom Fennerio/APTN. “Did you guys you have any questions right now of us? I’m sure you have a million things running through your head,” said Lioumanis. “When are you guys going to start?” asked Tyler’s father, Robin Maracle. “We’ve started. The team has already started. Disclosure, we’ll call it disclosure, the materials from the OPP is quite hefty. There’s a lot of stuff that these guys have to review. Just because someone was interviewed, we’re going to have to re-interview that person. We’re not just going to skip them off the list. We’ll start from scratch,” Lioumanis replied. The officers kept most of their thoughts to themselves, but did tell the families something everyone agreed with. “Listen, anybody that’s been in a boat knows to try to sink a boat from the top down with weight it has to be excessive, right?” said Smith. “You’re not sinking it, as long as you are not doing anything ridiculous that boat is not just gonna sink on its own.” Following APTN’s tests, the coroner’s office brought in two boating experts to conduct their own tests. They confirmed the boat didn’t capsize, but was swamped, meaning it would have slowly filled with water before sinking flat, like the hand of God reached down and pushed it to the bottom of the bay without disturbing anything inside the boat. A crescent wrench was still lying on a seat. “It’s safe to say this thing is not flipping over… otherwise things would just go flying,” said Eugene Liscio, a forensic analyst with Ai2-3D. It would take “considerable and sustained” effort to swamp the boat, said Jami Buckley, of BYD-Naval Architects. “As it’s going down, it will rock back and forth gently, because once you’re underwater it’s not happening fast. You still have some buoyancy there, but like once the water had come over into the boat, at a certain point, the mass of the water would have overcome the buoyancy that the vessel has and then it would have gone down,” said Buckley at a meeting with the families last March. “You can kind of see it from the APTN video as well, like you have to kind of hold [the side of the boat] underwater for not just a moment, but hold it underwater with a sustained effort to overcome [the vessel’s ability to self-correct].” Liscio and Buckley provided four possible scenarios of how the boat could have sank and the coroner’s office accepted two of them – the boat sunk by an external force, as in someone killed the fishermen, or a large enough boat came bay at 3 a.m., when Maracle and Fairman were on the water, and its wake created a large enough wave that came over the back of the boat and swamped it. This resulted in the coroner’s office stopping short of reclassifying the deaths as homicides even though Buckley said the large boat scenario was unlikely, as there were no such vessels reported to be on the water that night, which was still before fishing season opened. “It’s a pretty small bay. I don’t think there’s big enough vessels that are transiting through there to create that,” he said. Tags: aptn Investigates, Erin Benoit, Featured, Fishing, Kenneth Jackson, Matty Fairmain, National, Secrets of the Bay, Shona Patterson, Steve Smith, Ted Lioumanis, Tyendinaga, Tyler Maracle Continue Reading