Remote Canadian town where shootings occurred has bleak history

Sudden deaths in La Loche, Saskatchewan, where shootings at two locations left four people dead and seven wounded on Friday, are an all too familiar event.

But before Friday, suicide was the main cause of such deaths. The police on Saturday offered few additional details about the shootings. The 17-year-old suspect, whose motive has not been revealed, remains in the custody of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, who said they had also seized a weapon.

The police said the suspect, whose identity cannot be disclosed because of his age, faced four charges of first-degree murder, seven charges of attempted murder and a weapons charge.

The police identified the victims as Marie Janvier (21) an educational assistant at the school; Adam Wood (35) a teacher who moved to La Loche from Ontario in September; and two brothers, Dayne Fontaine (17) and Drayden Fontaine, (13) who were killed at a home about half a mile from the school.

La Loche is more than seven hours northwest of the nearest major city, Saskatoon. It is a community with high levels of unemployment and addiction to drugs and alcohol and a reputation as a tough town.

In 2011, two Mounties were forced to barricade themselves into the local health clinic when a mob attacked them after incorrectly assuming that the officers had beaten a man who had been injured in an all-terrain vehicle accident. A police truck was also burned, and an ambulance badly damaged.

When La Loche appears in the provincial news media, it is usually in connection with violence or drug arrests.

But looming over the town, whose residents are predominately Dene Indians, are sporadic waves of suicides, including one last year. Eighteen people, most of them young, killed themselves from August 2005 to January 2010 in La Loche, which has a population of 2,600.

"It's certainly one of the worst communities for having nothing for youth," Chief Bobby Cameron of the Federation of Saskatchewan Indian Nations said on Saturday. "I was just talking to the chief and council there last night. We really have to take some dramatic means."

Laurence Thompson, a sociologist in Saskatoon who has worked with the native friendship council in La Loche for several years, said that while the town’s lakeside setting in the Boreal forest was spectacular, its poverty was immediately apparent.

Despite being the hub for nearby communities with a combined population of about 4,000 people, La Loche has no sit-down restaurants, no banks, no movie theaters, not even a coffee shop. The nearest Tim Hortons restaurant, a Canadian staple, is about 60 miles away.

“There’s just not enough of an economy to support these kinds of activities,” Thompson said. More critically, the absence of such enterprises largely limits employment to a tiny number of local businesses and to government posts or jobs at publicly funded institutions, like the clinic and schools. Police officers and local professionals are often hired from elsewhere. Many fly in, do their work and fly out.

“What do you do when you leave school in La Loche?” Mr Thompson asked. “You either leave town, stay and get one of the few jobs in the community or stay and do nothing.” One result, he said, is that much of the community survives on public benefits.

“Getting a quality education for our youth is vital,” Chief Cameron said. “But we tell them that they have to leave to seek employment, find opportunities.”

Despite the town's desperate economic circumstances, Mr Thompson said the La Loche Community School, which holds classes in two buildings for students from junior kindergarten to 12th grade, was a bright spot. The high school building, where two of the victims were killed on Friday, is modern, clean, well equipped and well-staffed. It would not be out of place in a prosperous town in southern Canada.

Chief Cameron, who lives at the Witchekan Lake First Nation, south of La Loche, agreed. But he said that even a good school filled with dedicated teachers could not always engage students whose parents’ lives are disrupted by alcohol. The town has a government-owned liquor store and two bars, despite the lack of restaurants. Students may find themselves sharing a small house with 10 other people because of a chronic housing shortage.

Prosperity, or at least stability, has been tantalizingly close. Not far to the west is Fort McMurray, Alberta, the heart of Canada's oil sands. It was Canada's greatest boom town until the recent decline in the price of oil. But the lack of a road, other than a very rough ice road in the winter, has meant that few La Loche residents have been able to take jobs there.

The residents of La Loche who have escaped a reliance on welfare tend to be older and follow traditional Dene methods of living off the land through hunting and fishing. Few of the town’s young, Chief Cameron said, have such skills.

The New York Times