I can’t forget a strange moment after Robert Robin Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to manslaughter in the death of our friend, CBC journalist Michael Finlay. This was last May following his plea hearing. The judge had left the courtroom, the lawyers were closing their laptops, the few other people on the spectators benches were leaving or gone. I was still sitting there, processing what had just happened, and Cropearedwolf sat in a chair not far in front of me. He was in his leg shackles, waiting for the special constable to take him back to jail, where he had been held for more than a year. 

He turned and smiled at me. Unable to believe it, I looked over my shoulder to see who he might really be smiling at, someone behind me. Nobody was there. When I turned back, he smiled at me again, unmistakeably this time: a thoroughly charming smile, broad, the smile of someone expecting to be liked, a smile that might often have worked with women. But I was stunned. I thought, You’ve just pleaded guilty to killing my friend of more than 40 years and you’re smiling at me? I picked up my backpack and rushed out of the courtroom. 

Michael died in January, 2023, after a random street incident. He was walking along Danforth Avenue in Toronto near his home. And now I’m going to quote an agreed statement of facts from the plea hearing. 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, Robert Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to being the man who had pushed or shoved Michael, causing his death.   

Yesterday was his sentencing hearing, and I was back in court in Toronto, the courtroom again presided over by Mr. Justice David Porter, who had overseen Cropearedwolf’s preliminary hearing in February as well as his plea in May. During the nearly day-long sentencing hearing, Crown Attorney Meghan Scott asked that Cropearedwolf be sentenced to between 6 and 8 years in prison, citing his extensive criminal record. She was able to locate convictions starting in 1995 and only ending when Cropearedwolf faced several outstanding charges after being arrested in Michael’s death. 

Scott said that most of the convictions were for either theft or breaking and entering, and that Cropearedwolf had been sentenced in a wide variety of jurisdictions—so many, Scott said, it was hard work tracking them all down. Many were in Canada, chiefly Alberta and Ontario, and others were recorded across the U.S., with convictions and occasional jail time recorded in Washington state, Arizona, California, Idaho and as far east as Illinois. Five convictions involved violence, and two of these were for domestic assault. Her research showed that Cropearedwolf had returned to Canada in 2019 after serving six years in a U.S. penitentiary for burglary. Afterwards, he was charged and convicted in several further cases, as well as facing a charge of manslaughter in Michael’s death. 

In rebuttal, his defence lawyer, Talman Rodocker, cited his client’s traumatic childhood. As the son of a single mother with substance abuse problems, Cropearedwolf was first removed from his home by Calgary’s child services when he was one year old. His subsequent experiences were detailed in a Gladue report, a pre-sentence look into the background of an accused that is available to people of Indigenous background like Cropearedwolf. Through Rodocker, Cropearedwolf said the report contained private information and asked for it to be sealed. Justice Porter agreed, saying he routinely seals psychiatric evidence, and considers the Gladue reports similar. It will never be made public.

However, Rodocker referred to parts of the report in open court, calling Cropearedwolf’s seizure by child services an example of the continuing Sixties Scoop, in which Indigenous children have repeatedly been taken from their families and placed in white foster homes. Cropearedwolf remained in touch with his mother, Rodocker said, and he was protective of her from a very young age, worrying, for instance, about a time she drank Lysol. Cropearedwolf was sent to several foster homes and later to group homes, and Rotdocker said he suffered abuse and racism, although he was happy with one family. He lived for some time on a farm in Alberta, and a son of the white farm family wrote a letter to the court detailing the good qualities he’d seen in his friend. Rodocker also said that Cropearedwolf had been addicted to both crack and heroin, although he said he was now clean. He spoke of his client, who is 45 years old, as being “immature,” adding that Cropearedwolf is artistically gifted and intends to reform. He asked for a sentence of three years’ probation.

Mr. Justice Porter will hand down the sentence on September 17 of this year. In determining the sentence, he will have in front of him the complex story of Cropearedwolf’s life, a biography told through the submissions from both the Crown and his defense lawyer. He will be weighing the sentence for someone who was an abused child, a man with a lengthy criminal record, an Indigenous person facing racism, a thief apparently undeterred by past incarcerations, a man convicted twice of domestic assault (the thought of which makes me shudder) and a man who eventually took someone’s life. 

By pleading guilty to manslaughter, Cropearedwolf admitted that he intended to push Michael that day on the Danforth, an admission that Rodocker acknowledged again in court yesterday under questioning from Justice Porter. From what I understand of the law, in manslaughter there is no immediate intent to kill. That’s murder. But manslaughter can involve crimes in which a perpetrator assaults someone when they should know or suspect that death is possible. How careless are they of what poet Mary Oliver calls another person’s “wild and precious life?” And there’s this: how much is society to blame for the carelessness and self-absorption that comes from societal racism and institutional blindness to childhood abuse? And what, therefore, should a perpetrator have to pay for his actions?  

I’ve been thinking about Cropearedwolf’s intentions ever since rushing out of the courtroom in May, upset by the way he smiled at me. In the hallway, taking deep breaths, I wondered if he had been advised that if he pleaded guilty, he would spare Michael’s family and friends the trauma of a full-scale manslaughter trial. I knew this could happen, and not just from TV cop shows. My brother is a lawyer. I knew there could be plea bargains. Spare the family and friends and maybe you’ll get a shorter sentence. Nor does it hurt to spare the state the expense of a full-blown homicide trial, which can run to $1 million. I’d attended the preliminary hearing into the crime every day the previous February, and apparently Cropearedwolf had placed me as someone who knew Michael. I wondered if his smile was saying, Look, I’m a good guy. I’m sparing you further trauma. (And maybe getting a shorter sentence.)

I’m a novelist. I make things up. I have no idea what Cropearedwolf was thinking when he smiled at me. I mentioned it to a police detective at one point and he frowned, saying that in his experience it was pretty hard for an ordinary person like me to read someone with an extensive background of convictions and incarceration. It changes people, he said. Their points of reference are different, along with their suspicions and hopes, since they’ve spent their lives in a different world. I have no idea if that’s true, either. Frankly, I’m not sure what to feel about Cropearedwolf, especially since he ended the defense submission yesterday with a statement he made to Michael’s family and friends.

Standing at the podium, Cropearedwolf read a short statement, saying he was “truly and honestly sorry” for what he did. “If I could turn back time and prevent this incident from occurring, I would,” he said. “I beat myself up every day for his death…I’m doing everything I possibly can to change myself to become a positive and responsible person.”

Can he change? I hope so. I’m not in possession of a crystal ball. I know that habits can be hard to break but that it’s not impossible. I wish him well in his attempts at reform. 

Yet there was one other statement made in court yesterday, this one by my husband, Paul Knox, a fellow journalist who knew Michael for more than 50 years. Because there’s another side to this story, isn’t there? On the one hand, there’s Cropearedwolf. On the other, there’s Michael, his family and his many friends, and with them—us—there’s society in general, particularly its most vulnerable members. 

Michael had an extraordinary career as a journalist, which I’ve written about here. But by the end of his life, after suffering several bouts of cancer, he was visibly frail. The last time I saw him was in December, 2022, when I ran into him on the Danforth. We didn’t live that far apart and I used to run into him fairly often. This time, I was walking east and saw an elderly man standing with one hand on a lamppost, looking winded. I felt sad—then worse, realizing that the elderly man was Michael. I went up to him and joked around a bit while doing up his coat, which wasn’t fully zipped, and settling his backpack onto his shoulders. He liked being teased, liked being helped, and he filled me in on his latest news. He finally said he was all right, and we walked off on our errands. I’m glad to have that one last memory of him.

Paul still grapples with his death. Well, we both do. But this is what he told the court yesterday about his good friend, and of the reverberations from Michael’s death that ripple out into society.

Victim Impact Statement

Paul Knox

I’ve known Michael Finlay for more than 50 years, ever since we found each other together in the office of a bratty student newspaper at UBC in the fall of 1967. A couple of years later, Michael became the editor-in-chief, and he wrote an editorial that some guy took to be a direct attack on his wife. It wasn’t. Michael didn’t know either of them, and no one was named in the editorial. But it was a good thing Michael wasn’t around when the guy came looking for him. He was big and loud and not interested in dialogue. Fortunately, he never came back, or Michael might not have had the life he had. And maybe we wouldn’t be here today. 

But we are here, and I want to thank everyone for making it possible to talk about the effect my old friend’s killing has had on me. First among you is my wife, Lesley Krueger, also Michael’s dear friend, who’s showed up so faithfully for this part of his story. I also want to thank Mr CropEaredWolf for listening. Today, I intend to talk about two things. One is the fear his attack on Michael has pushed into me, so that when I go out into this city as an obviously old and very obviously disabled person, I am haunted by dark truths about chance and ill will. The other is about the place where this fear lives — the Michael place that opened up every time we saw one another, to be enriched with memories of our friendship and fresh manifestations of the person Michael was.  

The fear begins in front of the Spanish deli beside the drugstore where I go to pick up prescriptions for the symptoms of multiple sclerosis. I think about Michael being pushed over, of his ribs cracking, of the cardiac arrest and the oxygen drop that killed his marvellous brain. More than that, I think about the moments before contact, when he saw Mr. CropEaredWolf moving toward him, a fast-travelling danger impossible to process, much less to block or evade. That brief rushing terror. Descent. Howling pain from ripped muscle and shearing bone. Then the struggle to understand, the faceless assailant gone, strangers gathering. Michael’s battered body once more rallying, reaching toward life.

I don’t linger there, but the knowledge stays with me. I’ve become hyper-aware as I roam the city. I search for anomalies in the visual feed. Twilight comes early, settling a mist of threat. People prey on the disabled in semi-deserted underground passages. I know this; a young guy swooped in from behind me, grabbed my phone from my hands and disappeared into the subway. People were around but no one saw. I told the mall cops. I don’t know if Michael lived with this fear. I hope not, but I also wish he’d survived the attack, and if he had, his fear would have been far more intense than mine. 

I said I wanted to talk about the space where Michael used to be. It was there from the earliest days when we were brothers in arms — part of a brash cohort of journalists that broke rules and battered away at walls and ceilings. Although I have to say we made a lot of mischief, we worked hard, listened to teachers and absorbed the essentials: how language helped organize stories, how power and wealth held sway, how to not be wrong. We learned from each other, but Michael had a poet’s tricks and a crime writer’s sense of justice, and I always thought I got the better deal. 

Life, love and the pursuit of world events took us along many paths. We didn’t travel much together: Michael focused on sound, on CBC Radio, and on Africa; I on Latin America and the printed word in The Globe and Mail. But we never lost track. We ended up living just blocks away from each other, out on the Danforth. We were able to get together now and then, when he wasn’t beating back another assault by cancer and I wasn’t overwhelmed with my own medical investigations.

Here’s what I think about when that Michael space gets on my mind. I think about one of the pillars of journalism, in its justice-seeking, holding-to-account mode. That is its concern for the underdog — the people cast aside and left along the road as narratives of progress marched forward. The human cost of power struggles, the solitary seeking of individual justice — this is what drove Michael over and over to Africa, shaped his documentary practice in radio, and informed his own mentorship of fresh waves of reporters. Individual cries for help are often alarms of system failure, and journalists are sometimes the only ones who stop to investigate. We don’t expect it to be easy. One of Michael’s colleagues said he was a slayer of bullshit, and no one disagreed.

The Michael space I used to cherish — the space where fear now lives — shouldn’t be our only concern here today. With Michael gone we are short one ally, and in that sense we’re all victims.  This room, this building, has seen its share of underdogs. Perhaps that’s a condition Mr. CropEaredWolf has identified with at times.

Events in my daily life often call to mind some anecdote Michael told, or an observation he made. Sometimes I ask myself what he would have thought. In fact, I’ve wondered what he’d say about the events that brought us here: the trials of his life, the manner of his death. Would he find the story outrageous, ironic, mordantly humorous? What would the slayer of bullshit have to say? 

This is the impact I have to report: I wish I could expel the fear and welcome Michael back in. I want to ask him these things and hear him reply. I want to, and yet I never will.