Boy on Ice: The Life and Death of Derek Boogaard

by John Branch

  Small towns in places like Saskatchewan did not have their own police departments. They had an outpost of ever-changing RCMP members. To Canadians, they were ordinary cops blended into the background of daily life. Americans were more likely to call them “Mounties,” and picture them atop horses and looking like Dudley Do-Right, the befuddled and cheerful cartoon character.

  Do-Right was usually drawn wearing the RCMP dress uniform, the “red serge,” including the heavy wool red coat, knickers-length pants with a yellow vertical stripe, black leather riding boots, and brown, flat-brimmed hat that Americans might compare to one worn by a national-park ranger. That was the ceremonial uniform, and what Len wore to his wedding. RCMP members on duty typically looked more like a standard police officer seen in other countries—hard-brimmed cap, light-blue shirt, shiny black shoes, and the telling yellow-striped pants.

  Recruits, after being vetted through an application process (and, beginning in 1974, including women), were assigned to a 32-person troop and spent 24 weeks in basic training at Depot Division. Their rigorous schedule included physical training, classroom study, field exercises, and, at noon every day, marching on the parade ground in front of the chapel.

  When they graduated, they were assigned to someplace, anyplace, in the country. Typically, they began in a small, rural town and worked their way toward the cities. Postings were temporary, and the RCMP tried to shuffle members every three to five years. The fear was both burnout and familiarity. Too much time in a small town allowed members and their families to grow close to residents. Relationships might taint a critical sense of objectivity and fairness. The side effect was that police officers were perpetual outsiders, especially in the smallest towns, seen as agents of government with little appreciation for the machination of a town’s unique structure, rhythm, and values. They were a necessary part of civic life, their oversight appreciated by most, but rarely did RCMP members weave themselves deeply into a community’s social fabric.

  It could make investigations difficult, as Len found when witnesses stonewalled to protect people they knew. Simple traffic stops could be spun into coffee-shop gossip. Conversations sometimes stopped when Len walked in.

  Finding close friends proved difficult for the Boogaards, even with a growing brood of children who might otherwise serve as conduits to lasting relationships. Some parents simply did not want their children hanging around the family of the town police officer, whether because they knew that the Boogaards would soon be on the move again or for reasons having to do with distrust and small-town politics.

  Len and Joanne quickly recognized the trickle-down effects of nomadic police work. Len liked his job, but did not love what it was doing for his family. And he was never crazy about Saskatchewan, which he considered rural and unrefined compared to places like Toronto and Vancouver.

  So before Len could be reassigned to his next posting, and now with two young boys, he again followed the lead of his brother Bill, leaving the RCMP for the York Regional Police in Ontario, north of Toronto. It was close to Len’s parents, and one of Joanne’s sisters lived in the vicinity, too. Ontario was where Aaron was born in August 1986 and Krysten was born in February 1988. It was where five-year-old Derek played hockey for the first time.

  But the move did not bring the Boogaards the serenity they anticipated. Len’s 12-hour shifts and hour-long commute in each direction kept him from home. The suburbs of Toronto were more expensive than what the family was used to in Saskatchewan, and Joanne, with four children under the age of six, had no time to work.

  Len reconsidered his career after three years in Ontario. He missed the relative independence of the RCMP—the freedom to structure shifts the way he wanted, to investigate cases from start to finish. With the York police department, he felt confined by the regimen. There were uniform inspections. He had to log every action and record all the miles he drove in the car, making note of any scratch to its paint. He was told what area to patrol, which streets not to cross. Even if he was the first responder to a crime, he usually handed his notes to an investigator who took on the case. He felt suffocated by the bureaucracy. The RCMP gave you a car, they gave you a gun, and they trusted you with them.

  Besides, Joanne missed home on the prairie. The Boogaards convinced themselves that their children would be better off growing up in western Canada, after all.

  Len rejoined the RCMP in the summer of 1988. And just as his oldest child, Derek, was to start first grade, Len’s first posting in his second tour was in another tiny town on the plains of southern Saskatchewan.

  THE TRANS-CANADA HIGHWAY spans nearly 5,000 miles from St. John’s, Newfoundland, in the east to Victoria, British Columbia, in the west, making it the longest national highway in the world. The barren 500-mile stretch across the prairie in southern Saskatchewan and Alberta, between Regina and Calgary, is among the most desolate of all. The windblown road strings together a series of midsized hubs, most more than 100 miles from the next, whose compounded names are synonymous with tough-minded, no-nonsense junior hockey: Moose Jaw; Swift Current; Medicine Hat.

  Herbert, Saskatchewan, population 700, sat at a rare bend in the road, on the north side of the highway and across the railroad tracks that loosely paralleled it. Its rectangular grid measured about 10 blocks in one direction and five blocks in the other. There were a few stores, a post office, and a school. On the north side, on a plateau above a string of small lakes, there was a white, aluminum-sided hockey rink, where Derek played for the Herbert Hawks, clad in maroon.

  Like many small towns dotting the prairie, Herbert was founded after the Canadian government, in 1903, opened up much of its land to settlement, calling southern Saskatchewan the “World’s Choicest Wheat Lands.” Many of those who rushed into the Herbert area early in the 20th century were Mennonites, particularly Russian-German Mennonites who had homesteaded first in Manitoba or the northern United States. Decades later, when the Boogaards arrived, Mennonite roots in Herbert were thinned but deep.

  The Boogaards bought a house in the middle of a block on the south side of town. Neighbors took a fondness to Joanne, with her sweet manner and her hands full with four rambunctious children. They did not know what to make of Len, with his brusque temperament. Whether by design or disposition, he rarely socialized, and when neighbors saw him outside of his police work, it was often at the rink, standing silently alone and occasionally shouting orders at his children.

  Len soon found something amiss in Herbert. A couple members of the Mennonite congregation came to the police, concerned about a youth minister’s relationships with young boys. As the RCMP investigated, immigration officials found that the man was a former American Marine convicted and discharged in a child-molestation case. Immigration officials issued a warrant. Len made the arrest.

  Some disbelieving church members objected. A few filed complaints against Len in an attempt to discredit him, saying they had spotted him in his police car not wearing his seat belt or that he illegally towed his kids behind a snowmobile. The RCMP dismissed those complaints. But the harassment extended beyond Len. As the Boogaard children got older, they regularly learned at school that their father had arrested or cited someone in a classmate’s family, or had embarked on an investigation that threatened reputations and the local social order. The aggrieved could not reasonably take out their frustration on Len. It was the Boogaard children, particularly Derek, who most often felt the brunt of resentment, manifested in slights from both children and adults.

  “It was kind of tough growing up for our family because we moved around, and it was hard I think because my dad was a police officer,” Derek wrote as an adult, his notes sprinkled with misspelled words. “Not so much as from the ages of 6–12 because us kids didn’t see it yet. Make a long story short, the first year my dad got on a case when we were in Herbert SK. It is a very religious town. Found out something about the prist [sic] and had to deport him back to wherever he came from. The town kinda resented us and this was t
he first year we were there.”

  Among the four Boogaard children, assimilation problems were starkest for Derek. He stood out for his size, the biggest student in class. People mistook him for a much older boy, and expected that he act like one, too. But he was easily distracted and occasionally disruptive, and when trouble arose in the classroom or the playground, children were quick to point to big, clumsy Derek, who had few friends to back his side of the story.

  Joanne, knowing Derek had few friends, invited every child in Derek’s class to his summertime birthday parties, hoping at least some of them would come. The first-grade party had a dinosaur theme and only a couple of children.

  Many teachers considered Derek to be a bully, and they were not surprised. His father, after all, was the gruff new RCMP member.

  “Do you know who my father is?” a defiant Derek asked his teacher on at least one occasion.

  In fourth grade, he was relegated to a closet in the back of the classroom, the walls acting as blinders to keep him focused straight ahead.

  Derek’s report cards were filled with low grades and comments from teachers who gingerly informed the Boogaards of his classroom troubles. One grade-school teacher called Derek “challenging” and said he “is capable of doing much better.” But Derek “is very hard on himself and gives up very quickly.”

  At times, the teacher wrote, Derek could be a good team player. But “when things don’t go well, he can display poor team spirit and sportsmanship.”

  The Boogaards got Derek a tutor and had him repeat a year in grade school. While it helped Derek catch up academically, it further stigmatized him. His size stood out even more among his younger classmates.

  The Boogaards compensated by encouraging Derek to play hockey and join the swim team, where friendships could be formed away from the confining caste system of school.

  “My team was called the Herbert Hawks,” Derek wrote. “We had maroon jerseys & socks with white lettering saying Herbert across them. I’m pretty sure I started out with the number 42 in Herbert.”

  Joanne provided an escape by taking the children to a sister’s cabin on a lake, where Derek swam and an uncle taught him to hunt. Len took Derek away by letting the boy ride along in the patrol car.

  Soon, though, the RCMP said it was time to move again. And the Boogaards, with four children between the ages of five and 11, were happy to go.

  IT WAS 1993, the summer that Derek turned 11, that the Boogaards moved 300 miles northeast to a town called Melfort. With about 5,000 residents, it was a metropolis compared to the earlier places that Len was assigned.

  The family house was at 316 Churchill Drive, a U-shaped lane off Brunswick Street. It faced south, into the low winter sun, and its blond-brick facade was framed by two tall spruce trees. Len planted a basketball hoop into concrete on one side of the driveway.

  The Boogaards filled the space inside with numbers and volume. As the children grew, the square footage of the home seemed to shrink, and the kitchen table got smaller when surrounded by six Boogaards. The basement was a refuge, filled with boys playing video games or wrestling on the floor. More and more, they tumbled out the doors and into the yard.

  The neighborhood was filled with split-level houses, most with one-car garages. A hockey goal in the driveway marked where children lived. Across Brunswick Street sat a wide, open park, and in the middle of the park was a massive grass-covered mound, taller than any house. In winter, children sledded down in every direction.

  The summit provided views of the strikingly flat surroundings. In all directions, the horizon was a tease. The tallest structures to puncture the landscape were a water tower, a grain silo, and a pair of brick apartment buildings on the north edge of town, not far from the police station where Len worked. Tract houses at Melfort’s boundaries seeped into empty fields that stretched to the far edge of the sky.

  Melfort had a few traffic lights, mostly along the two-lane highway lined with a jumble of motels, gas stations, and restaurants. At the corner of Manitoba Street and Stovel Avenue was the Main Arena. It was sided with pea-green aluminum and had a painted-white cinder-block facade. The arched roof displayed the year it was built: 1931.

  “Again, the same stuff happened as in Herbert,” Derek wrote in his notes years later. “They picked on the new kid.”

  The first nemesis was a boy named Evan Folden. He and Derek met on a soccer field, and Folden, a year older, took an instant dislike to the hulking stranger. There were a few mocking taunts. A crowd gathered. Finally, the intensity led to a wrestling match and a few wild swings. Folden emerged with a bloody nose.

  He was cleaning himself off in the school bathroom when Derek walked in. He, too, had a bloody nose, but Folden hadn’t caused it. It had come at the fist of an older girl. She had stood up for Folden and repaid Derek’s punch with a spot-on punch of her own.

  Folden would become a friend and hockey teammate, but not before more scuffling. A wintertime snowball fight got ugly when Derek drilled Folden in the face from close range. Folden charged. Derek’s nose streamed blood into the cold air. He came home with his jacket torn.

  Derek was viewed as a litmus test of toughness for other boys, particularly older ones, who saw in him an oversized kid with glasses—a physically imposing, meek-minded target. Some nicknamed him “Stupidgaard.” Even the friends of Derek’s brother Ryan, sometimes two grades younger, would come over and pile on Derek, as if he were a piece of playground equipment or an oversized family dog.

  Derek quietly suffered the indignities of his size. His knees ached as a teenager because of the growth spurts. He was diagnosed with Osgood-Schlatter disease, a condition in which the cartilage at the end of the large leg bones swells to the point of pain. Derek wore braces on his legs during bouts of debilitating discomfort.

  In the pool, young children hung from him like a float toy. In the rink, rivets attaching the blades to the boots of his hockey skates constantly gave way under his weight.

  Amid a rough-and-tumble childhood, the boys took to “cage raging.” They wore hockey equipment and fought, imitating the toughest enforcers of the time—people like Bob Probert, Rob Ray, and Tie Domi.

  “It’s where you put your gloves and helmet on and just go at it like a hockey fight and the loser is the one on the ground,” Derek wrote. “This is where you kinda learn how to punch.”

  Derek rarely considered repercussions. He once moved a friend’s trampoline close to the garage, climbed to the roof, and—encouraged by other teens—belly flopped onto the canvas. The springs broke and the frame collapsed. Derek hit the ground with a thud, bruising his ribs. Another time, he rode a sled down a mound and into the street, in front of a passing police car. The young female officer, Jody Vail, knew that he was the son of another RCMP member, the one who was training her. She lectured Derek about safety and the importance of making sound decisions.

  Somewhat inadvertently, Derek found refuge straddling school cliques while not succumbing to any of them. He was goofy enough, crazy enough, to be entertaining. He was mild-mannered enough, self-deprecating enough, to be endearing. It got him by.

  He meshed with the jocks because of his hockey stature. Derek was never the best player on his team, but he was always the biggest. For most of his childhood, that was enough to earn him a perennial roster spot on the top-level teams in town. But Derek also glided into the outcast world of the skateboarders, a clique called the “skids.”

  “The girls were even attracted to the skids,” Derek later wrote. “Luckily for me, I was friends with both sides.”

  Hockey was the constant, and while his parents did not force it upon Derek, they encouraged it. It was good for him, they thought. It provided structure. It instilled discipline. It occupied his free time and surrounded him with friends. It supplied him with coaches who could serve as mentors.

  As much as anything, though, it connected him with family. The Boogaards were leery of outside forces on their vulnerable son. And Derek appreciated
the cocoon that the combination of hockey and family provided.

  “I think the best part of playing hockey from ages 3 until 16 was the little road trips with dad,” Derek wrote years later.

  AT ABOUT SIX FEET, Len was not a particularly tall man—all four of his children eventually grew taller them him, apparently inheriting height from their mother—but he was sturdy and broad-shouldered. He expected discipline from his children, and the threat of his temper was the concealed weapon that kept them in line. Derek both loved and feared his father.

  Len’s mustache and steely eyes seemed a disguise for his feelings. The inflection of his voice was as steady as a bass drum, and he was fluent in the languages of inquiry and sarcasm. It all made it difficult to decipher his thoughts. Even the most mundane interactions felt part of a silent, internal investigation.

  But Len had a playful side, revealed only to some. And Derek came to appreciate, and emulate, his father’s dark sense of humor.

  Derek gleefully sat in the front seat of the police cruiser and watched as his father pulled drivers over and wrote traffic tickets. He wanted to hear all of his father’s stories. Some of them, like the one about the man whose excuse for not wearing his seat belt was that he had “anal seizures,” became family chestnuts, told over and over.

  Derek also liked the story of Len coming to the scene of a large deer that had been struck by a car, its hind legs broken, but still alive. Len removed his standard-issue .38 revolver and shot the deer in the back of the head. It dropped instantly. On his next pass down the highway, Len saw the same deer, a stain of blood on its head, standing as if nothing was wrong. Flabbergasted, Len stopped and shot it again, with a different gun. Derek, unable to control his laughter, asked to have the story told again and again.