Moments before 3:30 pm on January 24, 2023, the lives of two men fell apart on an ordinary stretch of Danforth Avenue in Toronto. My friend Michael Finlay was pushed into a wooden holiday planter and died a week later of his injuries. The man who has admitted to pushing him, Robert Cropearedwolf, was sentenced to prison yesterday for manslaughter.

I knew Michael for more than 45 years at the time of his death, and wrote about him shortly after he died as we—his family and friends—mourned him. Writing about Michael was a major part of my own mourning. I’m fortunate to live in a world where friends almost never die violently, and ever since then, I’ve been trying to process what happened. Writing is my way of coping. 

After the sentence was handed down yesterday, I wrote some more. In this case, I began to pull together a chronology of Mr. Cropearedwolf’s sad beginnings and his long criminal career, trying to understand what had happened on the Danforth. Mr. Justice David Porter read many facts about his life into the record as he handed down the sentence, and others had come out during previous hearings into the crime. 

There were three earlier hearings: a preliminary hearing early this year, which until yesterday was under a publication ban, and which I can finally write about now. There was also a hearing in which Mr. Cropearedwolf pleaded guilty to manslaughter, and a sentencing hearing when the Crown recommended a sentence of six to eight years, while the defense asked for three years’ probation. Yesterday Mr. Justice Porter handed down a three-year sentence, cut to 20 months owing to time served, to be followed by three years of probation.

Yesterday, I wrote what I’d learned about Mr. Cropearedwolf’s life until the day of the assault. Now, drawing largely from evidence given at the preliminary hearing, I want to write what I learned about Mr. Cropearedwolf’s movements starting at about noon on January 24, 2023, little of which has been public before this. 

Defense lawyer Talman Rodocker said that it began as a good day for Mr. Cropearedwolf. Things were going well and he was in a celebratory mood. The police investigation showed that it was roughly noon when he went into a store he often visited, one that sold skating shoes, patches and skateboards, and where he bought a new pair of shoes. The clerk, who testified at the preliminary hearing, said he had worked in the store for almost a year and knew Mr. Cropearedwolf from four or five previous visits. 

He called him Robin, and recalled that he’d bought a number of pairs of shoes that year. He said Mr. Cropearedwolf liked good clothes, high-end fashion brands like Arc’teryx jackets, Adidas Busenitz shoes, Pit Viper shades. In his casual way, the clerk testified that a lot of people in the city like these brands if they have money, and that Robin was always well-dressed. A security video obtained by the police shows Mr. Cropearedwolf leaning over the counter as he bought some decals as well as his shoes, large red-and-black decals called Spitfires that proved important later. So was the plastic bag in which he carried his new shoes.

Another witness at the preliminary hearing testified to a subsequent stop made by Mr. Cropearedwolf across from Wilkinson Public School on Donlands Avenue. The witness said he was outside the school to meet his two children when classes got out. He noticed a man he later identified as Mr. Cropearedwolf on the west side of the street gluing a large red and black decal to the back of a traffic sign. He described as being like an emoji of a devil’s face, and the Crown showed a picture he’d taken of the sticker somewhat later, which matched the Spitfire stickers Mr. Cropearedwolf had bought in the store.

The witness said he wouldn’t have thought anything of it if Mr. Cropearedwolf had been pasting a notice to a telephone or light pole; people did that all the time. But he said he found it odd that someone was pasting a stickers on a traffic sign and began to watch. This attracted the attention of Mr. Cropearedwolf, whom he said began to berate him from across the street, yelling that he would never be anything like the witness. 

“I will never be like you!” the witness said he yelled. “I won’t be like you!”

The witness was alarmed, even after his young daughter left with his wife to go skating. He pointed out that he’s 5’3” and that he was intimidated by the man across the street. However, he still had to wait for his son, and was worried about the other children leaving school, so he began to walk in circles on the street corner to keep an eye on Mr. Cropearedwolf. That’s when a bus drove down Donlands between them, and once it had passed, Mr. Cropearedwolf was gone.

He was next reported walking east on the south side of Danforth Avenue not far from the school, approaching the place where he would soon push Michael into the planter. At that time, Michael was walking west on the same side of the street. While listening to the evidence in court, I thought he was probably on his way to his favorite pub, Gabby’s, where he went every day at about 3:30 to do the crossword at a table the bar staff reserved for him. Michael was part of a crowd of regulars, many of them good friends who had been very kind to him during a series of chemotherapy treatments for three different cancers. However, I was later told he was on his way to the supermarket to do some shopping, planning to buy some frozen lasagna. 

Michael’s poor health forms a big part of the story. Following the sentencing hearing, I wrote that the last time I saw him was around the middle of December in 2022, about six weeks before he died. We didn’t live that far apart, and ran into each other fairly often on the Danforth. We would stop to chat, and sometimes sit down at an outdoor café in summer. But this was December and cold. I was walking east when I 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 joshed, enjoyed being fussed over, and filled me in on his latest news. He finally said he was all right, and we walked off on our errands. 

Testifying about Michael’s health at the preliminary hearing was forensic pathologist Dr. Kimberly Hamilton, who was accepted as an expert witness for the first time in her young career by Mr. Justice Porter. This means I heard her impressive credentials detailed, starting with her undergraduate education at U.B.C. and medical school at the University of Victoria, where she won the UVic President’s Medal in 2015 for having the highest GPA in the school, reaching a perfect 4.0 average. She received her MD in 2017 and to date had done 300 autopsies, qualifying as a Category A pathologist. 

Dr. Hamilton testified that she had conducted the autopsy on Michael under the supervision of a senior pathologist, and her findings later went through a peer review process. All agreed with her chief finding: that Michael died as the result of blunt force chest trauma in the context of his chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart disease; his arteries were severely clogged. Michael’s fall into a wooden planter broke two ribs and caused a pneumothorax, which many people know as a collapsed lung. She also determined that the injury would almost certainly not have killed a younger and fitter person. But she found Michael to be in poor health, and as a result, he died from his injuries. 

These are the important findings. But what I found terribly moving was that Dr. Hamilton said that the autopsy showed no sign of cancer, even when she conducted a microscopic investigation. Michael had told a group of us over dinner a little more than a year before that his oncologist had called him a marvel. He’d beaten cancer, clear for five years after surgery for lesions on the lung, liver and colon. Michael said the oncologist had told him only 3 per cent of people survive the collection of cancers he’d fought. 

Now I teared up in the courtroom. Michael was in bad shape, but he truly had beaten cancer. I was also grateful that the pathologist showed no slides of the autopsy, as the Crown had warned she might, so I didn’t have to flee the courtroom. Instead I could sit quietly with my sorrow.

***

So—here we have Michael walking west on the Danforth, visibly frail, 73 years old, far from well yet also a survivor. Meanwhile, Mr. Cropearedwolf was walking east in his celebratory mood, by this time holding up one of the decals, which he’d made into a mask. He seems to have pasted a decal onto a piece of cardboard and found a stick that let him hold it in front of his face. His lawyer, Mr. Rodocker, said in court that he was saying, “Look at me!” He also referred to Mr. Cropearedwolf, who was 43 at the time, as “immature.”

What happened next is at the crux of the case. Two witnesses testifying at the preliminary hearing said they saw Mr. Cropearedwolf veer out of his path and either push or shove Michael into the seasonal planter. His lawyer, Mr. Rodocker, did his job and went hard after both witnesses—women whom I saw as thoughtful, helpful people who were trying their best to convey truthfully what they’d seen. He suggested to one witness that she had really seen an elderly man falling of his own accord, a fall not precipitated by the actions of the man with the red mask. The witness replied with a flat “No,” saying that she stood by her description. 

Throughout these cross-examinations, Mr. Rodocker pointed out that memory is unreliable, and of course it’s true many studies show that people often remember details wrong. Despite this, both women insisted on their central points. Mr. Cropearedwolf had veered, then pushed or shoved Michael: descriptions that were later included in the agreed-upon statements of facts in the case.

Yet the well-known fallibility of memory made a video of the incident important to the case. Unfortunately, the only footage discovered by police wasn’t the best. It was taken by a security camera at a butcher shop located about 40 meters away from the place where Michael was pushed, and it had to be blown up to show the incident. This means that the time stamp on the video was blown up as well, and it obscured much of the central part of the frame, although not all of it.

The brief video was played multiple times in court, first in the preliminary hearing and later during the sentencing hearing, meaning that I saw it more times than I can count. At first it was hard to make out what was going on. Then I realized that the man with the backpack walking away from the camera was Michael. He was surrounded by a small crowd of other pedestrians, most of them young and moving faster than he was; people walking both toward the camera and away from it. 

Meanwhile, Mr. Cropearedwolf walked toward the camera with a black and red mask held in front of his face. Since the camera was photographing him straight on, it was hard to tell how far away he held the mask. However, it struck me as undeniable that Mr. Cropearedwolf veered toward Michael in the second or two before they met, as the statement of facts says. But the push is mostly obscured by both the pedestrians and the time stamp, and no matter how many times I watched the video, I could never make out the moment of contact.

That makes Mr. Cropearedwolf’s description of his thoughts, motives and action crucial. 

In a statement made through his lawyer, Mr. Cropearedwolf said that as he walked down the Danforth, he held the plastic bag containing his new shoes in one hand and his decal mask in the other. He said he held the mask close to his face so he couldn’t see in front of him. When someone got in his way—Michael—he said he didn’t know the person was elderly and frail. He just wanted them out of the way, so he pushed them aside with the back of the hand that held the mask. 

“I had no animosity,” he said in a statement that forms part of Justice Porter’s judgment. But the person fell, and when he saw this, Mr. Cropearedwolf said he panicked and ran. In fact, a second security video shows Mr. Cropearedwolf running down an alleyway close to the place where Michael fell, after which he disappeared.

Earlier, standing at the podium at his sentencing hearing, Mr. 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.”

Mr. Justice Porter accepted both Mr. Cropearedwolf’s statement and his contrition. In his judgement, Justice Porter said that Mr. Cropearedwolf had behaved in both a “reckless” and “intentional” fashion. But he also accepted Mr. Cropearedwolf’s assertion that he had not known he was pushing aside a vulnerable person. 

“This was not a deliberate attack on an elderly man,” he said. 

In his judgment, Justice Porter also found that Cropearedwolf’s use of force against Michael was not comparable to the force used in other manslaughter cases referred to by the Crown. These had resulted in steep sentences, which the Crown was seeking: six to eight years. In one of these cases, the person convicted of manslaughter had punched a victim in the face, making him fall backward. The man had struck his head and died. Justice Porter noted that the force used in that case was far greater than the “push or shove” Mr. Cropearedwolf had given Michael, and that the eight-year sentence handed down in the other man’s death wasn’t appropriate. 

Three years, he said, minus time served. 

Sitting in court for the judgment, listening to Justice Porter calmly read his 22-page statement, I felt that Mr. Cropearedwolf was lucky to meet with compassion in the courtroom. A different judge could have interpreted the ambiguous video to show greater intent on Mr. Cropearedwolf’s part, and decided not to believe the assertion of a criminal with 65 convictions that he hadn’t meant to hurt anybody—since, after all, there is a decision involved in giving someone the benefit of the doubt. 

Something, that from the sounds of it, Mr. Cropearedwolf hasn’t received very often in his life. 

***

A few more moments from the preliminary hearing stay with me. I was touched to hear that after Mr. Cropearedwolf ran away, numerous witnesses had called 911, and a couple of kind people stayed with Michael until the first responders arrived: a crew of firefighters. When they pulled up in their truck—and this was just like Michael—he rejected the fire captain’s advice that he go to hospital. Instead, he insisted he’d be all right and started walking home on his own. 

Two police constables intercepted Michael as he turned onto Jones Avenue, not far away. The first to get there was Constable Katherin Papaconstantinou. Constable Papaconstantinou testified during the preliminary hearing about her encounter with Michael in efficient replies, usually one sentence long. 

Yet she had also videotaped the encounter with her body-worn camera, as did her colleague, Constable Allen Hou, who arrived soon afterward. These videos are the last I saw of Michael, and I was deeply moved by the kindness of Constable Papconstantinou, who spoke to our stubborn old pal very gently. In the video, Michael is clearly in pain, probably in shock, but she quietly persuades him to get in her car so she can take him to Michael Garron Hospital, where Constable Hou later testified that he stayed with our friend until he received care. 

What hit me hardest was the moment when Michael answered their question about what had happened. He said “he” threw him into one of those planters. “It feels as if I got checked into the boards, ” Michael said. 

We used to play hockey together in a group of junior reporters, starting when I was going to the University of B.C. and Michael had only recently finished his master’s degree. It was summer and we were all working the night shift at The Vancouver Sun. There was nothing to do when we got off shift at 3:30 in the morning, so someone had the bright idea of booking ice time for a pick-up hockey game at what was then called the Four Points Arena. I think we played once a week over the summer, starting at 4 a.m., and Michael was one of the players who knew what he was doing. Michael and my future husband, Paul. I was maybe 18 and had never played hockey, although I brought my white figure skates to the arena, the type with picks on the toes. That put me one step up from our night city editor, who couldn’t skate, and whom we put in goal.

Later, when a group of us had moved to Toronto, we played pick-up with a city-wide group of journalists. The game was mixed men and women, although the women began dropping out in what was soon understood to be an announcement of pregnancy. One night Michael injured his knee, and I drove him to Emergency, still half kitted out in his hockey gear. He was blond and fair, and turned an interesting shade of greenish-white from the pain. I can still hear his voice in Emergency that night, with his characteristic emphasis on the last word of his sentence. 

“Well, this isn’t right,” he said.

Nothing that happened on January 24 last year was right. Yet I hope Mr. Cropearedwolf is able to take Justice Porter’s advice to try to integrate into some sort of community after his release from prison. I hope he keeps to the terms of his probation, especially the requirement that he undertake community service. I hope he finds a job, and very much hope he keeps away from weapons. He killed a good friend, and nothing is going to change that. But he’s been given a chance to rehabilitate himself, and I very much hope he takes it, and that he finds more help in getting there than I think he’s had so far. 

You can jump to the first part of the story here.