Robert Robin Cropearedwolf was sentenced in the Ontario Court of Justice today to three years in prison for manslaughter in the death of our friend, CBC journalist Michael Finlay. Given time already served in custody, Mr. Cropearedwolf will spend 20 months in prison. At the end of that time, Justice David Porter has ordered that he serve three years’ probation under strict supervision.

Mr. Cropearedwolf will be required to report regularly to his probation officer and do 180 hours of community service during the first 18 months after his release from prison. He will also be required to look for a job. Mr. Justice Porter said that altogether, he hoped this program would promote a feeling of responsibility toward the community. Then there’s the final requirement: Mr. Cropearedwolf will be prohibited from owning weapons for life, including cross-bows, guns and ammunition.

All this happened two days after Michael Finlay would have turned 75.

Michael was a good friend of more than 40 years. He died in January, 2023, after a random street attack that took place when he was walking along Danforth Avenue in Toronto near his home. According to an agreed statement of facts, Michael was “pushed or shoved” by a stranger he hadn’t spoken to, falling hard into a planter of winter greenery and breaking two ribs.

A cancer survivor who suffered from cardiac disease, Michael was 73 years old and frail. He was treated in hospital for the broken ribs and internal injuries. A day later, he was sent home, but within a few hours he felt ill and called 911. Michael had a heart attack in the ambulance and never regained consciousness, dying on January 31, 2023, a week after the incident. His death was the result of “blunt force trauma” of the type that wouldn’t have killed a younger and healthier person. In May, 2024, Mr. Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to being the man who had pushed or shoved Michael, causing his death.

Now it was time for Mr. Cropearedwolf to receive his sentence, and I was in court wanting to be almost anywhere else—preferably having a coffee with Michael, listening to him chuckle. It’s been a long haul since Michael’s death and Mr. Cropearedwolf’s arrest on manslaughter charges a month later. There have been three hearings since charges were laid, including a four-day preliminary hearing and a sentencing hearing I wrote about on July 15 of this year. That’s when Crown Attorney Meghan Scott asked for Mr. Cropearedwolf to be sentenced to between six and eight years in prison, while defense attorney Talman Rodocker asked for three years’ probation. 

It’s been a very long haul for everybody involved, but as Justice Porter noted today, justice not only has to be done, it has to be seen to be done. In his detailed 22-page judgment, Justice Porter walked a fine line in handing down the sentence, given Mr. Cropearedwolf’s Indigenous background and his extraordinarily difficult childhood, details of which the judge put on record today.

There is also the fact that Mr. Cropearedwolf has a long criminal record, with what Justice Porter said includes at least 65 convictions in both Canada in the U.S. Most are for breaking and entering (called burglary in the U.S) and for possession of stolen goods. Three convictions on record involve violence. One is a conviction for domestic violence, one for an assault with a weapon. The third stems from Michael’s death. 

So, Justice Porter said, there was Mr. Cropearedwolf’s individual situation to weigh in the judgment along with the overall rights of Indigenous people, whom he noted make up 10 per cent of the prison population in Canada, while they form only two per cent of the population overall. Precedent-setting judgments in other cases have established that the history of collective racism and injustice faced by Indigenous people must be taken into account during the sentencing of an Indigenous person. And of course, the judge had to weigh the overall rights of Canadian citizens to feel safe, and especially the rights of people who feel vulnerable. 

My husband, Paul Knox, is disabled with multiple sclerosis and uses a motorized wheelchair to get around. Given his 50-year friendship with Michael Finlay, Paul gave a victim impact statement during the sentencing hearing, one that Justice Porter noted in his judgment highlights the trauma that incidents like Michael’s death can cause vulnerable people in the community. In his statement, Paul said that the random, unprovoked attack on our friend has left him feeling more fearful as he navigates the streets of Toronto. And of course, such fears had to be weighed in bringing down the sentence as well.

Given our long-term friendship, I’ve found it hard to attend the hearings into Michael’s death, and I’m finding it difficult to write up the details of Mr. Cropearedwolf’s sentencing. Since I’m a (very) former journalist, it would be easy to churn out an impersonal news story, saying that first Justice Porter said this, and then he dealt with that. But this is a situation of great nuance, and I’ve decided to write up the final sentencing from a slightly different angle, creating a long chronology leading up to Michael’s death by putting together evidence from several different hearings.

In court today, Justice Porter read into the record the details of Mr. Cropearedwolf’s history, which were gathered in a Gladue report, the pre-sentence look into the background of an accused person of Indigenous background. Through his attorney, Cropearedwolf had earlier said the report contained private information and asked for it to be sealed. However, Justice Porter today made public some of the information to help explain his judgement.

He said that Robert Robin Cropearedwolf was born 45 years ago in Calgary, Alberta. He met his father only once, an Indigenous man who lived with his family in Saskatchewan. His mother was a member of the Blood tribe of Alberta, a woman with serious alcohol problems who drank to an extent that worried others during the last three months of her pregnancy with Robert, although he was referred to throughout the hearings as a clever man. She was also involved in several abusive relationships over the years which caused her son anguish. He has two older half-sisters, one of whom said in the Gladue report that she, too, had met him only once.

Robert was seized from his mother by social workers when he was a toddler and placed in a succession of foster homes, mostly for six months at a time. A psychologist who met with him for a dozen years until he was 18 years of age noted that he nevertheless remained attached to his mother and tried to both protect her and excuse her behaviour. The psychologist attempted to set up regular meetings between Robert and his mother, but said that when she came to the sessions, his mother would ignore Robert and only make eye contact with her, the psychologist, talking chiefly about herself.

Nevertheless, whenever his mother showed up, Robert was happy. When she didn’t, he would steal things from both his foster families and from school. I noticed that the psychologist didn’t report any violence, but that theft first came into the picture when he was between six and eight years old. The psychologist added that she felt she’d achieved a victory when, much later in their sessions, Robert was able to distance himself somewhat from his mother and offer a degree of criticism of her behaviour, as well as a degree of understanding. 

The record read in the report contains gaps. There was one brief reference to Robert attending a Catholic boarding school. There was also reference made today to the fact he’d eventually been adopted. Again, in the earlier sentencing hearing, we heard that he was successfully adopted at some point into a white farming family. A adopted cousin sent a letter to the court calling Robert a good guy; Justice Porter read further details from the letter today, saying that the cousin felt he was a kind and helpful person. 

There was also one further mention in the statement of Mr. Cropearedwolf’s mother. Justice Porter noted that Mr. Cropearedwolf was quoted in the Gladue report as saying that when she died in 2006, he began to use marijuana, heroin, cocaine, alcohol and other drugs. In an earlier statement to the court made through his lawyer, Mr. Cropearedwolf admitted that he’d been addicted to both heroin and cocaine, but said that he’s now clean. 

Running parallel to this story of Mr. Cropearedwolf’s sad childhood is the story of his criminal career, which has now lasted more than 25 years, and has led to those 65 known convictions. Crown Attorney Meghan Scott said during the sentencing hearing that it was difficult to tally all his convictions, since they occurred across the United States and in several jurisdictions in Canada.

When doing a search myself over a year ago, I found Mr. Cropearedwolf turning up in news reports over many years. In one report from Idaho, during a routine police stop he was found in possession of several false passports, electronic goods and tools used in burglaries. He also appears in Toronto newspaper reports as being wanted in a $2 million jewelry theft. Ms. Scott said in the sentencing hearing that he had come to Toronto after being released from an eight-year prison term in Illinois. Afterward, as Justice Porter today noted, he committed a series of break-and-enters in Toronto, facing charges in which he was convicted after turning himself into police in connection with Michael’s death.

This brings us to the day in January, 2023, when Robert Cropearedwolf  “pushed or shoved” Michael Finlay and caused his death. I’ve written more personally about Michael elsewhere, noting down part of the long life’s path that brought him onto Danforth Avenue that day. The two men’s lives were very different, although Michael didn’t live a life of clichéd white privilege. His parents would divorce and he didn’t grow up wealthy, a middle-class kid who was as nervous as he was brilliant. His career hit admirable heights but it didn’t always run smoothly, and he faced multiple cancers along the way. 

Tomorrow I’ll write more about the day these two lives collided, and both were permanently changed.