28 Seconds

by Michael Bryant

  “How do I do … what?”

  “Get away with murder!… How do you do it, you motherfu—!!”

  I spun on my heel and walked away from her, toward King Street, where it was always busy.

  By now her horror-film growl had turned into shrieks.

  “Murderer! Murderer!” She asked me if I took Murder 101 at Harvard. A few people walked past in the wide alley, barely looking up at the scene, as I moved quickly away from her.

  A repeat of that performance was what I prepared myself for as we walked toward the courtroom on May 25th, seven months later. I wondered if the court security was nervous too.

  As 9:15 approached, Susan and I entered the court and sat at a table behind Marie and her team. Darcy’s father Allan was in the courtroom and so was Misty Bailey, Darcy’s girlfriend of a few months. She was surrounded by victim services staff from the Ministry of the Attorney General. Allan Sheppard just looked alone.

  I looked over at them a lot. I wished there was a way for me to make Mr. Sheppard, in particular, understand how deeply I regretted what had happened. Misty continued to weep, but never looked in my direction. Mr. Sheppard sat still, weighed down by a composed, resigned, quiet sorrow.

  Marie had already told me that on the way in I wasn’t to acknowledge Special Prosecutor Richard Peck or Ontario Prosecutor Mark Sandler. Don’t nod at them. Don’t wave at them. Don’t shake their hands. Stay away from them. She wanted no perception of friendliness between the prosecutor and me, or anything that would look as if some fix was in, which obviously it wasn’t. I wasn’t planning on yukking it up with them, anyways.

  Just before proceedings began, Sandler spun around and grabbed a chair from one of the tables. He put it in the well of the court, the middle of the room, and asked me to sit on the chair. I looked over at Susan and moved away from her. She seemed to swallow hard. Sitting down on that chair, I felt very exposed. The table had served as a cloak of sorts. Like a podium for a speaker. Something between the orator and the audience. But that was gone now. I was sitting there, fighting the impulse to squirm, for my leg to shake (as it constantly does), and tried not to look around. I still don’t know if the purpose of that was to give me a clear view of the judge, or because the accused should be seen to be sitting on a dock.

  And then it began. Richard Peck began speaking. And the words I was waiting for were almost the first that he uttered: “Your Honour, I am asking that the information before the court be marked as withdrawn.”

  So formal, these words, so technical. The “information” spoken of by Peck was the charges laid against me on August 31, 2009. Those charges were to be “marked as withdrawn.” He wasn’t asking the court to withdraw them: that was not within its jurisdiction. It was only within Peck’s jurisdiction to drop the charges, and with those words he’d done exactly that. Done, as in past tense. My nervousness drained away.

  But of course the extraordinary show had just begun. It was stranger than fiction that a former Attorney General in Canada would be charged with such serious crimes. It was exceptional but appropriate that the Crown (represented by the Attorney General of the day) had appointed an independent prosecutor from another province. It was unprecedented that Marie Henein had opened her defence case to prosecutors and police before trial. And it was unusual that the prosecutor would give the reasons for withdrawing charges in open court. Usually, the prosecutor just drops the charges unceremoniously, phoning defence counsel, and that’s it. The discretion lies solely with the prosecutor, and the judge need not approve anything. It’s like a police officer laying charges, or a parking constable writing a parking ticket.

  But as Marie often said: “There’s nothing ordinary about this case.”

  That morning, Peck set out in detail the reasons for the withdrawal of the charges against me, a move that was widely praised, by lawyers and newspaper editorialists, for the transparency and credibility it gave the process. Since the laying of charges, “a great deal more has been learned from the ongoing investigation,” Peck said. The case “falls short of the standard” needed to sustain a reasonable prospect of conviction, he said.

  “I wish to emphasize that this decision is mine and mine alone. I wish to note that officials of the Ministry of the Attorney General in Ontario had no input into this decision whatsoever, and that includes the Attorney General himself…. That approach is consistent with the independence demanded of me in this exercise.”

  AS PECK SPOKE, I drifted between listening closely to his remarks, and observing other people in the courtroom. From my vantage point in the middle of the court, I occasionally looked around, and behind, and upwards. Everyone seemed to be focused on the front of the court, to Peck’s submissions. There were two levels to this courtroom, with seats on the same floor as counsel and judge, and then a second floor, like a balcony, where there were still more seats. Probably a hundred people or so.

  The courtroom used to be the Toronto City Council Chamber, where the council met between 1899 and 1965, after which the grand, Romanesque space was converted into a courtroom, and a new City Hall was constructed. But the room, like most in Old City Hall, retained its grandeur. The spectators’ gallery for council simply became overflow for court observers. There were many details in that room that caught my eye.

  I’d been in that courtroom as Attorney General, for various formal ceremonies, including the swearing in of the current chief justice that I’d appointed. I’d also spoken there at the graduation of the Drug Court participants, discussed in another Chapter. I’d been newly sober when I’d addressed those fellow travellers, with whom I shared much, notwithstanding that I was the attorney, and they were the accused.

  Now I too was here as the accused. The room looked entirely different for me.

  I felt that I was in that room for the first time, even though I’d last been there about a year previous, gowned up in the formal attire worn by barristers sometimes, speaking exuberantly about Ontario’s first ever female chief justice of the Ontario Court of Justice. I’d posed for photos with Chief Justice Bonkalo, and also with my hero Ian Scott, who had appointed her as a Crown prosecutor when he’d been Attorney General.

  This courtroom was different now, to me. I wasn’t there as an officer of the court, but as an object of the court’s attention. I wasn’t to speak, but nor was I a spectator. Whereas before I’d been a headline star of the show, now I felt nothing about stardom. I felt rightly humbled in that courtroom, for the first time. I was no more or less special than anyone else in that room. Yes, that court-room felt different to me. Everything did.

  Peck began chronologically, taking the court through the early events of August 31, 2009: Sheppard’s intoxication, his visit to his girlfriend’s apartment, the 911 calls by neighbours reporting Sheppard assaulting his girlfriend, and then “a homeless man, possibly with a bicycle lock,” in Peck’s words. Then Peck brought Sheppard to the point of no return, as it turned out, with him crossing in front of my car. The next question, Peck said, was whether Sheppard had been the aggressor.

  Here was the part of the proceedings where Peck would outline past instances of Sheppard attacking other people—the so-called Scopelliti evidence. I looked over at Allan Sheppard, to see if he was offended by this part. There’s no question that this information was legally relevant to establishing who was the aggressor. But I’ve no doubt that this was very hurtful to hear, yet again, for anyone who wanted to grieve Darcy’s passing, rather than dwell on his demons. Allan Sheppard continued to sit very still, expressing little other than the deep sorrow I sensed, but only he knows what all that felt like. I’ve got a son too, and I wouldn’t have wanted to walk a mile in Allan Sheppard’s shoes, especially on this spring morning in this hallowed courtroom, hearing a chronicling of the painfully unmanageable life of Darcy Sheppard.

  Peck outlined six separate incidents of violence involving Sheppard. Marie had another half-dozen that could also have been included, but the point was made. Peck referred to
each witness who’d come forward by their initials. “A number of citizens who had had incidents with [Sheppard] recognized him and believed that they should turn this information over to the police, or to the defence, for further investigation. All of the incidents described were investigated by the Crown and/or the police.”

  I looked over at Susan, who was riveted, trying to make sense of all this, and needing more facts to do so. I looked at Misty, weeping still. At Allan Sheppard, watching Peck, and occasionally just looking down—blinking slowly, it seemed to me.

  “J.M.” was a grandmother, in her late seventies, who was in her car alone when suddenly confronted by Darcy Sheppard at a traffic light. “He started swearing.” He demanded that she get out of her car. “He was angry, she could not figure out why.” She tried to drive away from him, but he caught up to her and “slammed his bicycle right in front of her. He was trying to stop her car. He was now standing … feet apart, he started advancing toward her, yelling at her to get out of the car.” She “gunned it,” in her words, driving across the street, onto a sidewalk, to escape. “She described him as being like a madman.”

  Some of these stories I was very familiar with. Some I had heard only fragments. At a certain point, the litany of stories that came forward amounted to one story: Darcy Sheppard could get very angry, and violent, with drivers of automobiles, who more often than not were unaware of what prompted Darcy’s anger, and who described him as raving, mad, and extreme; people who feared for their lives, so much so that they contacted police or the defence to tell their stories (sometimes repeating the stories told to the police).

  As I listed to the J.M. incident, of course I imagined the terror of a 70-year-plus woman, thinking of my own mother. At that age, the face of their fear is like a child’s; they’re so astonished, for elderly people tend not to throw themselves into violent situations, wary as they are of their own frailties.

  But I also imagined Darcy Sheppard’s own fear. In his mind, perhaps, the burning indignation of yet another person disrespecting him, another moment of chaos heaped upon a life out of control, leading him to dangerously will the situation under control, a control framed by rage, and yet again that became impossible as the drivers sought to escape him, his futile efforts at control, his justice. It was gasoline on his lit fury. So furious that the senselessness of attacking a grandmother did not deter him.

  If you’ve never experienced such rage, you are fortunate. I’m not justifying his actions, but the time I’ve spent in recovery has taught me that for every injustice, for every resentment, there are a host of contributors, some people from the past, some imagined, some rational, irrational, some just hellish memories that can’t be shaken without divine intervention.

  When I heard J.M.’s story, I was obviously grateful for her courage to come forward, and subject herself to interviews and re-interviews and the pain of reliving a frightful memory. I felt an instant connection to her astonishment and need to escape this wild and inexplicable spectacle of Darcy Sheppard on that attack. And there was also a fleeting moment of recognition, of the demons at work in Darcy Sheppard’s own hell.

  After all, for several years now, I’ve sat in rooms and heard tales of terror from men just like Darcy. Exactly like him. And often they shared an incident on the streets of Toronto that had triggered the terror, given and taken, by the speaker at one of these weekly meetings. That terror lived by these men (and women too), however, could be somewhat managed, more often than not, as long as they were sober.

  Typically, the imperfect end to these fellow alcoholics’ stories was one of progress. Not perfection—few happy endings arise when that kind of terror is in the air. But progress: a slowly learned capacity to not repeat past bursts of anger, or to not allow it to so escalate. This progress, I hear almost every week as I sit on those chairs to be stacked eight-high at the end of the night, this progress demonstrates hope—to the speaker, as he tells it, and to all of us, as we live it with him, often with a weary nod of the head.

  Many, many miles have been walked in the shoes of our brothers and sisters in this fellowship of recovering alcoholics, men and women who connect with each other’s failures, our failures, in facing some version of the hell that Darcy could not manage, but which we’ve learned together to manage a little better than we had in the past. And so we reflexively nod our heads, in communion with the hope of that progress, and the miracle of one man’s survival, one woman’s survival, for one day, in sobriety.

  “A.P.” was a salesman crossing the road, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, Richard Peck began with the second instance of Scopelliti evidence. Darcy Sheppard shaved the tiger, “zoomed by” A.P., and exchanged expletives with A.P. on Yonge Street. What followed might not seem remarkable, except that A.P. was not alone in his confrontation with Sheppard. He was larger than Darcy Sheppard, which would have made A.P. a very, very large man, and he was accompanied by four co-workers. None of that slowed Darcy’s anger, “swearing and shouting loudly … spitting” and, wielding a bike lock, yelling “You want to go, let’s go.” A.P. said he “could smell alcohol on his breath.”

  That happened in June of 2009, Darcy’s last few months of life, and a time of increasing anger and violence, as evidenced by the string of reports that came in to the police and to Marie Henein. The next incident Peck reported on, involving “C.C.,” a 23-year-old woman, happened in late July 2009. Just over a month later, it would end for Darcy Sheppard.

  C.C. was driving downtown. “A cyclist was swerving in and out of traffic in an aggressive way.” As single-lane traffic was merging, Sheppard felt that he’d been cut off by C.C. There was yelling, then something happened with which I was familiar: “The cyclist passed her and pulled in front. He did a half-turn parallel to the front bumper of her car. She had to slam on her brakes to avoid hitting him.” For me, this was an eerie re-enactment of the 28 seconds.

  Peck continued: “The cyclist threw his bike on the ground and came at her. He was completely enraged. He called her a whore and a stupid bitch. She was scared, panicking, completely terrified, in her words. He repeatedly spat on her vehicle and her through her partially open window. She rolled up her window. She reversed her car, drove to the right. At first, the cyclist pursued her, but soon was diverted—his attention was diverted to another driver.

  “When she saw his photograph in the newspaper, she burst into tears because she knew this was the cyclist who had attacked her. She contacted the police.”

  Next was the incident of August 11, 2009, which was photographed by David Wires from his office window. These photographs were “remarkable,” Peck said, as he tendered them as exhibits for the court and stated, ominously, that “the probative force of that type of evidence cannot be denied.” Put another way, those photos, and the story behind them, were perhaps all that was needed for Peck to drop the charges.

  As Peck told the court, “D.T.,” in his BMW, was confronted by a shirtless Darcy Sheppard, on foot. D.T. was a foot over into the oncoming traffic lane, which had lit Darcy’s fuse. “The situation escalated. The man kept screaming, yelling, taunting, delivering expletives. He reached into D.T.’s car and tried to grab for the keys but it was a keyless model. He tried to smack D.T. in the face and grab the earpiece for his Bluetooth from his ear.” When D.T. pushed Darcy’s hands out of the car, he responded: ‘Get out of the f’ing car and I’ll beat your head in.’ He spat all over the car and was banging on it, grabbing the car and jumping on it.”

  And this part gave me chills: “The car had a narrow running board. He was holding onto the window. When D.T. tried to roll up the window, he backed away and then jumped back onto the car. He would not back off. D.T. tried to back the car up, but the individual jumped on the car and rode with it backwards.” Peck himself seemed taken by this incident, as he said: “At some point, Mr. Sheppard is the person we’re talking about, had his attention diverted by another person, and it was then that D.T. was able to drive off and go home and wash the s
pit off his car.”

  There were two additional incidents. One involved “B.S.” and also happened in August. I’ve told that story already. The other involved “L.S.,” on August 31st, the same day as the 28 seconds. In fact, this happened only a few hours before the 28 seconds—at 6:20 p.m. L.S. was driving downtown, and spotted “a cyclist who was weaving in and out in front of cars and doing figure eights in the intersection. She was frightened. The cyclist was acting erratically” and his “actions were preventing cars from driving.”

  This story I hadn’t heard before, or maybe I didn’t want to hear it. Of course, Marie had shared it with me but her words hadn’t sunk in, for me. “She had to slam on her brakes a couple of times to keep from hitting him…. She observed the cyclist put his hand through the open driver’s side window of a BMW … to reach for the steering wheel or scare the driver. The cyclist had been banging on many car windshields and was yelling at drivers.”

  I looked over at Susan, listening to Peck put the pieces of the puzzle together. Her eyes were particularly wide open. She’d previously heard tidbits about Darcy Sheppard’s similar incidents of attacking motorists. But to have them detailed by Peck—Susan was shocked, she later told me. Shocked at the terror wrought by this one man upon so many.

  Peck went on to state the obvious: “These would appear to reflect an escalating cycle of aggressiveness toward motorists in the days leading to the fatal interaction with Mr. Bryant.” It may have been obvious, but its implications had not before been the subject of my many internal symposiums of regret. I’d considered what might have happened that night, but not what might have happened had Sheppard not chosen Susan, me, and the Saab to confront that night.

  If Sheppard’s inner turmoil was reflected in “an escalating cycle of aggressiveness towards motorists,” then his demons must have been multiplying and moshing. As I inhaled deeply, then stared down at my shoes, Peck’s description of Darcy Sheppard’s life was ironically sobering. Flashing before my eyes were frantic looks from friends and loved ones, Marie Henein in particular, saying something to the effect that Darcy Sheppard was not going to leave Bloor Street alive that night of August 31st. Or, at least, someone was going to the hospital that night at his behest, they said, hoping to comfort me.