Tina House
Cara McKenna
APTN National News
Shonte Williams is visibly shaken as she recalls the scene that unfolded in the hours before her mother and brother were shot dead in a RCMP-involved shooting in small-town northern British Columbia.
Shirley Williams, 73, and Jovan Williams, 39, were killed in the backyard of their home in the tiny village of Granisle on the afternoon of Thursday, April 21.
The funeral for the mother and son was Tuesday, as residents of the retirement town with only several hundred residents try to understand how the violent incident unfolded.
Many lingering questions remain, and the deaths are shrouded in mystery and speculation as B.C.’s police watchdog starts a lengthy and covert investigation into its first double homicide at the hands of police.
The Shooting
In the background I could hear my brother.”
– Shonte Williams, Shirley Williams’ daughter
That Thursday began as a normal day for Shonte Williams, 40, who lives several hours away in Terrace, B.C.
She had a morning appointment, and called her mother to check in at about 11:30 a.m.
After saying a quick hello to her brother, Williams talked to her mother for about 40 minutes about the mundane events of that day. But then, she said, her mother started to get distressed.
Jovan had gone to the post office located just a few blocks from home, she said, and it was taking too long for him to come back. When he did come home, something was wrong.
“In the background I could hear my brother,” Williams said. “He had apparently come in and was very upset. He was talking about how the neighbour across the street and his buddies had all ganged up on him at the mailbox.”
Then, she said, a crowd apparently started gathering in front of her mother’s house. The phone became quiet.
“She said, ‘there’s more of them, they’re just standing there, staring at the house,’” Williams recalled.
“I said, ‘are you sure you want me on the phone?’ and she said ‘I think I better let you go, I’ll talk to you later, I love you honey.’”
That was at about 12:30 p.m., and it was the last time she would speak to her mother. And it was the same time police said officers received a call to a “neighbour dispute” involving a handgun.
According to the RCMP, officers arrived at 1:20 p.m., and surrounded the house. There was a confrontation involving someone who exited the home, police said.
At 2:50 p.m., RCMP said, shots were fired and the elderly mother and son were both dead in their backyard. No officers were injured.
Neither the police nor independent investigators have released any further information as a probe into the situation continues.
The Build Up
I knew that she did have concerns.”
– Mary Broadbridge, friend of Shirley Williams
Family and friends of Jovan and Shirley said that the shooting was a culmination of about seven years of escalating conflict between the family and some of their neighbours.
Williams said her mother told her that she believed her family’s complaints of harassment were linked to racism because Shirley, a white woman, married a First Nations man and had Indigenous children.
“Once they found out that my mom had an Indian husband and two Indian children she was really looked down upon by this certain clique,” she said.
Williams said that group included one unnamed ex-police officer who she believed was intimidating and harassing her family.
She said he was friends with their elderly neighbour across the street, Hank Fahr, who Williams alleges assaulted her brother with a baseball bat.
APTN knocked on Fahr’s door to ask him to respond to the allegations, which have not been tested in court, but there was no response.
The Vancouver Sun reported that Fahr’s wife Lynn said what people are saying about them is “bullsh*t.”
Williams said the harassment began with small acts of vandalism to her mother’s beloved garden such as plants getting broken and cut overnight.
Then, the plastic covering her greenhouse was slashed several times.
When Shirley and Jovan set up surveillance cameras with motion sensors, they were turned around overnight and the wires cut, Williams said.
Jovan, who moved back home to help his aging mother, set up ropes with bells attached so they could hear potential intruders, and a homemade lock on their backyard fence.
Eventually, Williams said, the two got their firearms licences and bought rifles for protection, which they kept locked up in their house.
“She couldn’t understand, she was trying to figure it out for years,” Williams said.
“She had gone to the cops but there were several occasions when she went back and add to her complaint, she would find out that her complaints that she tried to register just disappeared. They never existed. It got to a point where she had to document everything at home because she wasn’t getting anywhere.”
Shirley’s friend Mary Broadbridge said she had also known about problems with the neighbours, but that she never would have moved out because she loved her house too much.
“I knew that she did have concerns,” Broadbridge said.
“I had known two summers ago there had been stuff stolen here, and I actually even witnessed (some of the damages).”
Some people in the town have said both Shirley and Jovan suffered from mental illness. Those claims weren’t substantiated by family members or friends interviewed by APTN.
The Aftermath
“It wasn’t like the police were facing a marauding herd of elephants,”
– Doreen Miller, friend of Shirley Williams
Broadbridge, who called Shirley by her nickname “Boots,” found out about the shooting about 40 minutes after it happened through a phone call from a friend.
Another family friend, Doreen Miller, was out of town running errands when she heard from a neighbour at the grocery store that there were six police cars headed to Granisle.
It wasn’t until she got home at about 7 p.m. when she learned about the unthinkable: her friend and her son had both been killed.
Miller knew Jovan as a “hardworking young man” who she relied on to do chores like cutting the grass and shoveling snow from her roof. He worked in security before moving back home to help his mother, and created art as a hobby.
Miller said she still doesn’t understand how the shooting could have happened.
“It wasn’t like the police were facing a marauding herd of elephants,” she said.
“This was an elderly senior lady, a little bit stooped over, and why would they need all those police cars? To me, the police handled it the wrong way.”
In the days following the shooting, the home was cut off by police tape as eight officials from the Independent Investigations Office gathered evidence.
A little over one day later, Williams was allowed back to pick up her mother’s two beloved dogs and, at that time, she broke down when she saw her mother’s shoes on the back steps.
“I was thinking `did my mom run out without her shoes on` because she always puts her shoes on when she goes outside, but they were just sitting there, nice and neat, by the door,” she said.
“And that upset me a great deal.”
About a week later, when investigators left, a memorial of flowers was set up in front of the home.
With Shirley and Jovan’s cars still in the driveway, the house looked almost normal, except for visible dark patches of grass in the backyard, which is where the pair was standing when the shooting took place.
“If you see where the dirt is, right there, that’s where they were,” Williams said, gesturing to the spots.
“There’s nothing around them, nothing for them to hide behind. Why. I want to know why. They shouldn’t be dead. They’re my family.”
The shooting has shaken the small village, which held its first community meeting over the weekend to talk about the incident, and is expected to hold more in the future.
But, unfortunately for the friends and family members of the victims, answers aren’t expected to come for more than a year, according to Independent Investigations Office spokesman Marten Youssef.
“We are here … to provide the community with an overview of the Independent Investigations Office,” Youssef said.
“They will have answers at the end of our investigation.”
