Heinemann was edgy and dog-tired that early January morning. For the past month, the Barrie tru had been putting in extremely long days, every day of the week. To make things worse, Heinemann’s two young sons were restless and irritable, and he and his wife, Toni, were hard-pressed to get even three hours of uninterrupted sleep. Heinemann had just returned home after a forty-hour stint, part of which was spent supervising the clear of a massive marijuana grow op in the abandoned Molson brewery building south of Barrie. He had just fallen into a deep sleep when his pager went off.

Chippewa conjured up the bête noire of recent opp history. Located in the southwest corner of the province and only seventy kilometres northwest of the Chippewa of the Thames reserve, Ipperwash had been one of Heinemann’s first calls as a tru team member. In September 1995, after years of futile negotiations with the government to recover land the Chippewa claimed as their own, a group of about thirty natives from the Kettle and Stony Point reserves occupied a piece of land that had been incorporated into the park. On September 5, the press reported that the government was about to seek an injunction to have the native protesters removed, but they refused to budge. More than 250 opp officers, including two tru teams, descended on the park. By the time the smoke cleared, Dudley George was dead.

It could have been any one of the twenty-four tru members on-site, including Heinemann, who killed George, but Ken Deane was the triggerman, and therefore the perfect scapegoat. Deane was charged with negligence causing death.

The brotherhood rallied to his defence. An annual hockey tournament was established in his name; groups of cops sold T-shirts, stick pins, and other trinkets to raise money; and, most impressively, the membership successfully petitioned the union to add a surcharge to every cop’s monthly dues to help with Deane’s defence. This initiative alone raised almost $1.5 million.

In the criminal trial, Deane was successfully prosecuted. He then pleaded guilty to discreditable conduct following a Professional Standards Bureau (psb) investigation and resigned from the force. It was a classic application of the “bad apple” approach to problem-solving, and the sacrificing of Ken Deane exacerbated deep divisions within the opp.

Publicly vilified, in cop culture Deane was a hero. He also walked away from the ordeal with an estimated million-dollar settlement package and an excellent job in the private sector. The more Heinemann learned of Deane’s true fate, the more he thought that Deane ended up doing all right for himself, but that policing was no better off for the ordeal.

In 2003, Ontario’s newly elected Liberal government ordered a formal inquiry into Ipperwash, and it had convened just two months before Heinemann and his crew set off for Chippewa of the Thames. Although it would be July 2004 before the first witnesses were called, the stated rationale for the inquiry—to look into the events surrounding Dudley George’s death and to “make recommendations on avoiding violence in similar circumstances in the future”—made the opp brass more paranoid and hyper-vigilant than usual. To cops like Heinemann and his teammates, who had been involved in many “similar circumstances,” this was ludicrous: to avoid “similar circumstances” all the opp had to do was follow sops in confrontations with First Nations people. The Ipperwash inquiry followed tru cops like Joe Btfsplk’s black cloud. Although Al Capp’s lovable cartoon character meant well, he was a jinx, and now the Barrie tru was heading toward another confrontation on a native reserve.

The hostile at Chippewa of the Thames was a twenty-one-year-old, cop-hating, dangerous pain in the ass named Aaron Deleary. He had an extensive criminal record and an outstanding warrant on weapons charges. He was also known to be associated with warrior societies, in which shadowy criminal elements had become embedded on numerous native reserves throughout southern Ontario and northern New York.

In the midst of his rampage, Deleary had a phone conversation with First Nations Constable Dan Riley. Peppering his talk with racist slurs and invectives against cops, Deleary said that he was an avenging spirit sent to clean up the reserve. In reality, he and a cohort, a member of the Outlaws motorcycle gang, were trying to kill another low-life named Joey Albert, who Deleary claimed was a crack dealer. This, in Deleary’s view, justified shooting up Albert’s house and van in broad daylight—not to mention the house of old Mrs. Goldsack. (Collateral damage, Deleary said.) Police saw a wack job trying to rectify a drug deal gone bad.

With four women, Deleary and his accomplice barricaded themselves in a modest house at 788 Switzer near a busy convenience store. Band police aren’t equipped to take on active shooters, and Constable Riley followed protocol by calling the band chief, who in turn called the opp.