Five months and two days have passed and Sandi Steele still isn’t convinced her son shot himself to death.
“I miss everything about him,” said the mother of two from her North Sydney home. “I just think and think and think and wonder. I just want someone to give me answers. The waiting is driving me completely insane.”
A Cape Breton Regional Police homicide investigator had arrived at her home at 7:15 a.m. on Dec. 8. Roughly an hour and 45 minutes had gone by since police officers found her 22-year-old son Blair Devin Harris dead in his Sydney Mines apartment. The cause was a single gunshot wound.
The investigator informed her that there were three others in the apartment at the time of the shooting but the officer was sure the young man’s death was accidental, she recalls.
“He was sure that Blair did not do it intentionally, and it definitely was not a suicide,” said Steele. “He said ‘we have three people who we questioned and we don’t feel like foul play is involved.’”
Two days went by before she was able to get more information from a woman calling from the Nova Scotia Medical Examiner Service, Steele said.
“She was the one that told me he was shot in the left side of the neck with a .22 calibre rifle. I asked would it be possible that it was self-inflicted and she said the autopsy was not completed but it could be possible but unlikely.”
After failing to get answers from the homicide investigator, Steele followed up with the medical examiner’s office a month later but spoke to another woman this time. This woman didn’t sound so sure about whether the shooting could have been self-inflicted.
“She said, they’re performing the autopsy report and it would take months before I get the written report. She couldn’t say yes or no if it was self-inflicted.”
“You try to explain that to me, because it makes no sense.”
This is all she has to go on. The three others in the house with her son that night are in their late teens, she said. Steele said they were not close friends of Blair’s. She has not spoken to any of them since the incident and none of them have attempted to reach out to her.
She’s not prepared to say that her son was murdered, but she has not been convinced otherwise. Steele is convinced it would have been almost impossible for him to shoot himself in the left side of the neck with the rifle. Harris was right-handed and had a serious left shoulder injury. He was awaiting bone graft surgery in Halifax at the time of the death.
“You try to explain that to me, because it makes no sense.”
Harris’s cousin Alyssa Steele lived in the same house as her cousin in a neighbouring basement apartment. She said she visited Harris three hours before he was found dead by police. She was delivering him a pizza and she said she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She also didn’t see a gun.
The next morning, she received a call from her grandmother that her cousin was dead. She was on her way to visit her boyfriend in Newfoundland that morning. When she left her apartment, she encountered a Cape Breton Regional Police officer on the property.
“He said the best thing for you to do is to go away and feel better,” she recalled. “I found that a bit strange.”
She ended up being questioned a month later.
“The investigator was telling me he thought it was accidental and that was it. I didn’t think anything would change his mind.”
Harris did have a few run-ins with police. Last June, he was charged with mischief after urinating on a police car while walking home with friends after a night out drinking. He also had two drug possession charges on his record. All of the charges ended up being withdrawn.
“Why is this taking so long for a single firearm wound in the neck?”
Almost a month went by before Sandi Steele got an update on her son’s case. In January, she received some of his belongings from the homicide investigator and was informed that the gun involved in the shooting was among several that were stolen from a collector. The officer also informed her that hours before the shooting, he had been involved in a house shooting in Scotch Lake.
“I couldn’t believe it and I said to him if this is true, why am I now just finding out about this?”
Two months later, she discovered the case had been handed to another CBRP officer.
The Chronicle Herald spoke to a retired Nova Scotia police officer involved in several homicide investigations. The officer, who asked that his name not be used, said it’s possible that the fatal shot could have been delivered by Harris but he said it’s important that the investigating officer be upfront with the mother.
“Normally you would say this is what we think happened and here’s why,” said the retired officer. “You don’t give them the file but you can sit down with them and say, ‘Here are the pictures. It’s not going to be nice but if you want to see this we will show you. If not we’ll withhold the pictures.’ You try to help the family out as much as you can.”
John Butt, the former Chief Medical Examiner of Nova Scotia, said he’s surprised that the autopsy report has not been completed.
“Why is this taking so long for a single firearm wound in the neck?” asked Butt. “My suspicion is that they’re going to say that they’re going to wait for another report. The only report that they would legitimately be waiting for would be the police report.
“The medical examiner could have a position not consistent with an accidental discharge of the firearm. They could be at an impasse.”
The Herald inquired with the CBRP about the investigation but the department said only that “the file was referred to the Medical Examiner’s Office.”
Heather Fairbairn, spokeswoman for the medical examiner service, would not offer any details about the investigation, besides saying that when the report is finished the “medical examiner would communicate directly with the family and the results shared with the appropriate authorities.
“While we can’t speak to specific investigations or examinations, generally speaking cases can range from several weeks to months due to the comprehensive nature of the work and the various tests and analysis that are involved and often completed by third parties,” said Fairbairn. “We do not want to speculate on how long the process will take to complete.”
This provides no comfort to Steele. She says her agony grows with every day that goes by without knowing what happened to her son.
But she says she’s determined to fight on until she does.
“Blair deserves justice and we miss him so much,” said Steele. “He’s all that’s on my mind and it’s driving me crazy because I don’t really know what happened to my son.”
