KIMBER: Unanswered questions

Unanswered questions from the Shirley Street Standoff
by Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News
Aug 15, 2004

What to make of the latest bizarre twists and turns in the tempestuous, tortured and terrible — not to forget, in these news-less dogs days of summer, terribly titillating — saga of Larry Finck and Carline VandenElsen?

Last Tuesday, the Halifax couple at the centre of May’s infamous 67-hour Shirley Street Standoff were finally committed to stand trial in connection with the incident. They are each charged with breaching a court order for refusing to hand over their infant daughter to the Children’s Aid Society, forcibly confining their baby to keep her out of the hands of CAS workers and, finally, obstructing well-weaponed police officers — they showed up at Finck’s family home in the middle of the night packing a machine gun and battering ram in their arsenal — attempting to enforce that order.

Finck is also charged with six different weapons offences in connection with a gun shot allegedly fired from inside the house at the beginning of the standoff, even though — as became clear during the preliminary hearing — the Crown no longer believes he fired the gun.

And so it goes.

When they first appeared in court after their arrest, VandenElsen and Finck demanded an immediate preliminary hearing in order to get the facts of their case out quickly (not to mention asking for safe haven in Iraq).

But then last week, in the middle of that very hearing, they suddenly volunteered to waive their right to the preliminary and move directly to trial. Given that preliminary hearings are mainly intended to provide the defence with the outlines of the Crown’s case so the defendants can prepare for the trial, giving up on the hearing before it had concluded seemed… well, unusual.

Even more unusual, however, the Crown opposed the request. In part, that’s because Crown attorney Rick Woodburn wanted to present evidence to convince the judge there were grounds for charging VandenElsen instead of Finck as the trigger-person in the alleged shooting.

But Judge Castor Williams ruled there wasn’t enough evidence to support those charges, meaning the Crown is still prosecuting Larry Finck for firing the shot they no longer believe he fired.

Uh, OK…

In the midst of all this, we learned from the papers that Finck’s mother — who died of natural causes inside the barricaded house during the incident and whose body was then carried out by the couple on a stretcher when they ended the siege — had bequeathed Finck a grand total of just five dollars out of an estate worth three-quarters of a million dollars.

Tee-hee…

It is easy — too easy — to get caught up in the weirdness of all of this and lose sight of the important issues at the heart of this case.

Should Children’s Aid have been given a court order to take custody of Finck and VandenElsen’s infant daughter in the first place? Did Halifax Regional Police’s handling of the initial stages of this incident help provoke the confrontation that led to the standoff.

Both VandenElsen and Finck have a “history;” each has faced charges of abducting their children from previous relationships during custody battles. But there has never been any indication in anything I’ve heard or seen to suggest either of them was ever an abusive, or negligent, or otherwise unfit parent.

So why would Children’s Aid want to take their new baby away from them? Hiding behind its usual “protection of privacy” shield, the Society has had little to say about the circumstances that led them to seek the order but we have learned, as a result of the court proceedings, that it followed a call from VandenElsen’s ex-spouse, the one with whom she had the custody battle. Hardly a disinterested party.

And the police? While the force deserves credit for its patience and restraint during the standoff, it has now become apparent that the initial police actions — arriving in the middle of the night, heavily armed, and using a battering ram to try and gain entry to the house — may have been at least as responsible as VandenElsen and Finck for the way events so quickly spiralled out of control.

Carline VandenElsen is absolutely right. We do need a public inquiry into the way Children’s Aid and the Halifax police dealt with this case from the beginning. Because we won’t find the answers to the most important questions from the court cases.

Stephen Kimber