Someone beat up Blair Fleet in his own Ecum Secum yard over a lobster dispute last spring.
But who did it is even less clear after the first day of the trial of one of the fishermen accused of the assault.
“So this is the first time you’ve heard that Jesse Asprey went to the police to admit he assaulted you?” defence attorney Colline Morrow asked the victim in Antigonish provincial court on Thursday.
“No one ever told you?”
“No,” replied Fleet.
No one had apparently told the judge either.
By the end of testimony on Thursday judge Richard MacKinnon would hear the 28-year-old Asprey say that he repeatedly punched Blair in his yard on May 14, 2018.
The problem being that Asprey isn’t charged with the assault.
Austin Chambers and his son, Terrence Chambers, are.
And MacKinnon is presiding over both their trials on a single charge of assault causing bodily harm.
Terrence’s was scheduled to begin on Monday.
“Do you think I can hear that trial?” MacKinnon rhetorically asked the Crown after hearing Asprey’s admission.
“I don’t think I can hear that trial.”
And so Terrence Chambers’ trial will have to be rescheduled.
As for Austin, the father, his trial won’t continue until its next scheduled date of Sept. 11.
It’ll be then that MacKinnon and everyone else will get to hear why the Crown proceeded with charges against Terrence despite Asprey’s confession a year ago to the RCMP in Sherbrooke.
“This was known,” Crown attorney Courtney MacNeil said when asked outside court about the revelation of Asprey’s admission.
“I can’t answer that,” she said when asked why then the same judge was scheduled to hear both trials.
Whatever confusion the first day of testimony may have caused over who assaulted Blair Fleet, it did shed more light on the inner machinations of a dispute over fishing grounds off Ecum Secum.
The Eastern Shore community is on the border between two large fishing zones — Lobster Fishing Area (LFA) 32 to the south and LFA 31B to the north.
Austin and his wife Tanya had recently purchased a licence at the far end of LFA 32 from a fisherman in Three Fathom Harbour, 143 kilometres from Ecum Secum. The law allows a licence to be fished anywhere within its LFA.
However, in this territorial fishery of a bottom-feeding species that doesn't migrate any great distance, it is customary for a licence bought in a community to be fished near where it had been fished before.
The couple’s son, Terrence, was out on parole on a raft of charges from 2013 that include assault with a weapon, sexual interference and assault.
He was fishing the family’s new licence aboard Tanya’s boat The Joint Account with Dalton Naugler as captain from Ecum Secum.
That’s when Marie Joseph fisherman Richard Pace, whose licence is also for LFA 32, steamed toward them.
“We were hauling gear and I looked over and I could see this boat coming,” Naugler testified on Thursday.
“He came up. There were words said. I thought he was leaving. Then he came up right over the washboard.”
Naugler picked up the Bible to show the court how he alleges Pace’s boat broadsided The Joint Account, caving in the hull above the working deck and cracking the fiberglass down to the keel.
“You don’t know what word you’d use to describe it, terrifying,” said Naugler.
“… Were we gonna make it back, we didn’t know.”
Blair Fleet lives in Ecum Secum but is a deckhand on Pace’s boat.
Pace offered a different version of events.
“The two boats bumped together,” said Pace.
“I wasn’t really paying attention. I was on bait.”
Pace has been charged with mischief for the ramming but his case is yet to go to trial.
With one of their boats out of commission, the Chambers family was hauling two sets of lobster gear from one boat on May 14. It was a day that started at dawn and went until about 7:30 p.m.
On board with them that day as an extra hand was Jesse Asprey.
With both sets of gear landed, Asprey was at Austin’s house when he says the elder Chambers asked him to go get some bait and load it aboard for the next day’s fishing.
With the task complete, Asprey (who lives in Sheet Harbour) testified they then parked in the driveway of an Ecum Secum house he didn’t know.
Austin got out and went to the door while Asprey claims he leaned back in his seat on the passenger side, tired after a long day fishing.
It’s not in dispute that Austin Chambers showed up at Blair Fleet’s house and asked him to step outside to talk about something.
Fleet had fished a season years ago as a deckhand for Chambers and though he was now fishing for Richard Pace, considered Chambers a friend. They often saw each other fishing mackerel with rod and reel from the Ecum Secum wharf after lobster season ended.
“I went and got me boots on and went outside,” testified Fleet.
“I was pretty well down the wheelchair ramp when I was attacked from behind.”
Fleet claims he was punched repeatedly, fell to the ground and punched some more.
He claims he never got a word out and that when he looked up from the ground it was Terrence Chambers.
“Austin was standing over by the front of the truck,” testified Fleet.
“(Chambers) said, ‘better not be out in the boat tomorrow’.”
Asprey claimed in court Thursday that he was laying back in the passenger seat when he heard Pace and Fleet arguing.
“Blair made a move toward Austin,” testified Asprey.
“(Austin) just got out of hospital for something to do with his heart. I got out of the truck and hit Blair. He went down on the ground. As he was scuffling to get up, pawing at the ground, I heard him say ‘I’m going to f’n kill you, you f’n little (expletive)’. I turned around and hit him three or four more times.”
Then, according to Asprey, he and Austin got in the truck and drove away.
Blair shares the small house they were raised in with his brother, Lawrence.
The latter was watching television when he heard hollering outside and ran to the door.
“The person who assaulted him had his back to me, he stepped to one side and I saw my brother’s face full of blood,” testified Lawrence.
“… I saw Mr. Chambers watching the whole thing, he wasn’t doing anything.”
Blair managed to haul himself up and went inside and sat with Lawrence. He had a cigarette in the kitchen as they waited for the ambulance and the Mounties.
He was released from hospital later that evening.
The next day, Asprey was fired from his job as a crewman on Clem Fleet’s boat in Marie Joseph because his hands were too swollen to use a gaff.
He fished the rest of the season for the Chambers family.
After Terrence Chambers was charged with assault over the incident a few days later and had his parole revoked, Asprey told the RCMP in Sherbrooke that he had done it.
“(The police) took a statement but they were reluctant,” testified Asprey.
Asked by Morrow if he claimed to have committed the assault to get Terrence out of trouble, Asprey, who has no criminal record said, “No. I’m a big boy, I can take my lumps when they’re deserved.”
He added that he feels terrible about the incident and wants to apologize to Fleet.
For his part, Fleet said he’s “sure” it was Terrence, not Asprey, who assaulted him.
