July 22: Who’s on First?

The process set in motion by the murder of Christian Grenier and the A unit smash-up had only begun with the segregation of prisoners and the five-day reviews. When I returned to Kent on Tuesday, July 22, I spoke with Cacane Tremblay about the events leading up to Mr. Grenier’s death. Some prisoners in A unit had drug debts with prisoners in C unit, and although a meeting between them seemed initially to resolve the matter, it escalated into a situation in the yard in which threats were uttered and knives were flashed. Claude Forget, who was serving a 20-year sentence for the attempted murder of two police officers, made it clear that anyone threatening Mr. Tremblay would have to go through him first. Knives were drawn, and Mr. Forget defended himself with a baseball bat. When Mr. Grenier came to his assistance, he was knifed. Mr. Forget was struck on the back of the head with a baseball bat. Mr. Tremblay told me that the A unit prisoners involved were in deep trouble. They could not return to the population without risking death or serious assault, and, given how well connected Claude Forget was, Mr. Tremblay could not think of any maximum-security institution to which they could be sent without encountering major problems.

On July 23, I interviewed Glen Rosenthal and Pat McKenna in segregation. Mr. Rosenthal provided me with a running commentary on the events in the exercise yard, concluding with these words:

When you’re on one team in a situation like this, you tag someone on the other team before they tag you. That’s what happened. That’s why Christian got killed.

The honest-to-god truth was that this Christian was a nice guy. There was nobody involved on our side [in A unit] that had any ill intentions towards him whatsoever. But the guy’s got a baseball bat and he’s swinging it at Kenny Makichuk and the person who stabbed him cared a lot about Kenny. They were in a relationship, and what are you going to do? It’s a husband-and-wife kind of thing, and if someone is swinging a baseball bat at your wife or your husband and you’re standing behind them with a knife, what are you going to do? It’s like the sparks in a gas tank, and that’s what erupted here. (Interview with Glen Rosenthal, Kent Institution, July 23, 1997)

At the beginning of my interview with Pat McKenna, I told him I had received information from the institution that he was the trigger for the smash-up in A unit. I asked if he could explain how he saw his role in it, and also what had caused the rage that led to such extensive damage and destruction. His explanation painted a very different picture from the institutional images of a rogue prisoner out of control.

I had got married just before the murder and I was in a private family visit with my wife in the trailer when it happened. I came out of the trailer on Friday and walked straight into a lock-down. My wife was scheduled to come out on Saturday, Sunday, and then again on Monday. Because of the lock-down, we didn’t get Saturday’s visit, which was to be expected because there was just a murder. That’s fine. Then comes Sunday’s visit. That’s cancelled. That’s pushing it a bit, but still the administration is doing its investigation, and so that’s fine too. Now Monday afternoon comes, and in the meantime we’ve been asking to see the warden or the deputy warden to try and get this whole thing resolved and end the lock-down. Jimmy Whitmore sent a letter to the warden explaining our concerns about the cancellation of our visits, the lack of showers and no tobacco. What we get back from the warden is a reply saying that the institution will remain on lock-down until further notice and that prisoners will receive nothing except one shower that night. And we’re thinking, how long is this going to go on for? I talked to a keeper to get some sense of how long it might be, and I’m figuring, "You gotta open it up sooner or later." He tells me that in the United States, Marion [a federal super maximum institution] is on twenty-three-hour lock-down all the time. "What makes you think this institution is ever going to open up?"

All that weekend and into the Monday we’d been trying to get the administration’s attention and it hasn’t worked. The biggest thing was the visits. The whole smash-up could have been avoided if they had given us the visits. They could have ten less guys in the hole if they had given visits, because as soon as I walk into a visit, the first thing my wife is telling me is to calm down, chill out, don’t let this bother you. And everybody’s visitor does that. So for them to take that away is mind-boggling.

So now you’re locked in your cell and your efforts to get their attention is exhausted, so what else are you going to do? So yes, I did set a fire. Now the fire is an easy way to get their attention. Smoke comes out onto the range so they’re going to come down. Well, they came down, looked at the fire and said, "Let them burn" and left. I couldn’t believe it. So I set the sprinkler off to try and put out the fire and that didn’t work too good, so now I’ve got a cell filled with smoke. That’s how come the window got taken out. Because I couldn’t breathe in there. I kicked the window open to get some air. I was pretty desperate. And it’s self-preservation now.

When the guards were taking me out of my cell to segregation, they had this video camera on me. So I figured that I hadn’t had a chance to talk to the warden before, so this was going to be my only opportunity to speak to her and I did -- on camera. I spoke into the camera like a fool, and I said to the warden that this concern is not with the guards and I told the guards that "this isn’t with you guys. This isn’t personal. We’re not doing this because of something you did on shift today. We don’t expect you to clean it up. This is for the warden, and this is to let the warden know that there is a serious problem here in population." I probably shouldn’t have done it, because now they’ve got me under investigation for inciting a riot. When she saw that tape it probably looked pretty bad. I’m covered in water and black smoke and I’m naked, walking backwards down the hall, giving my fifteen-second message into a videotape. And I’ve got six guards around me with cameras and shields and sticks. I probably look like a maniac. The fact is I’m probably one of the more reasonable guys down here. I’m not an animal. This whole smash-up could have been avoided if we’d had some communication. (Interview with Pat McKenna, Kent Institution, July 23, 1997)

Kenny Makichuk was one of two prisoners alleged to be directly involved in the stabbing of Christian Grenier. He had not been formally charged at the time of my first interview, but was later charged with first-degree murder. Mr. Makichuk was a striking figure. His hair was closely cropped, he wore a nose ring and earrings, and there was a bolt-of-lightning tattoo running from the centre of his forehead over his right eye and down his cheek. Nobody would have any difficulty picking him out in a police line up.

I had heard from the staff at Kent and some other prisoners that Mr. Makichuk, though possessed of tremendous energy and intelligence, was embarked on a course that suggested a death wish. He had recently overdosed and almost died. I knew he had told Prisoners’ Legal Services that he wanted a woman lawyer to represent him on the charges he would likely face in the death of Christian Grenier. At the end of our conversation, he asked me to spell the word "misogynist." He told me he was writing to a woman friend and explaining to her that one of the difficulties of being in segregation this time was that some of the younger prisoners were unrepentant misogynists. He said he read a lot of feminist literature and was really impressed with it, this was one reason he preferred to be represented by a woman. Not for the first time, I was struck by the contradictions between the official perception of a prisoner and his presentation of himself.

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