A white man who shot and killed two Indigenous hunters on a country road in the Canadian province of Alberta has been found guilty of murder and manslaughter in a case that laid bare racial tensions in the region. The man’s father was also found guilty of two counts of manslaughter.
Anthony Bilodeau, 33, and his father, Roger Bilodeau, 58, were charged in the deaths of Maurice Cardinal, 57, and his nephew, Jacob Sansom, 39, on a March 2020 evening. After deliberating for less than a day, an Edmonton jury found both men guilty late on Tuesday.
The bodies of the two hunters, who had been celebrating with friends after a successful moose hunt, were found early on 28 March on a country road 160 miles north-east of Edmonton, a grisly crime that shocked the region.
Sansom had recently lost his job as a mechanic and worked as a volunteer firefighter. Cardinal was a keen hunter and outdoorsman. Both were Métis – a distinct group that traces lineage to both Indigenous nations and European settlers – and had permission to hunt the area out of season.
“These gentlemen, Maurice and Jake, were so important to our Métis community,” Andrea Sandmaier, a representative from the Métis Nation of Alberta, told reporters after the verdict. “It’s a huge loss to this family, it’s a huge loss to the Métis Nation of Alberta.”
Crown prosecutors had argued that Anthony Bilodeau and Roger Bilodeau believed Sansom and Cardinal to be thieves and had taken the law into their own hands with “tragic results”.
“Two innocent men, Jake and Morris, had absolutely no business dying that night, these two fellas did nothing wrong,” prosecutor Jeff Rudiak told the jury during closing arguments.
Photograph: Courtesy Family of Jacob Sansom and Maurice Cardinal
The guilty verdict in a case involving Indigenous victims and a white gun owner came in contrast to another high-profile case in the region. During his trial in 2016, Gerald Stanley admitted to shooting Colten Boushie, but was acquitted of murder charges. Boushie’s mother, Debbie Baptiste, was at the courthouse on Tuesday in support of Sansom and Cardinal’s family.
According to a timeline of the events presented in court, Roger Bilodeau followed Sansom and Cardinal, believing their truck had been spotted on his property the day before.
Bilodeau, accompanied in his truck by his teenage son, chased Sansom and Cardinal down rural roads at high speeds. During the chase, Bilodeau telephoned his son, Anthony and told him to bring a weapon.
Soon after arriving at the scene where the vehicles belonging to Roger Bilodeau and Sansom were stopped, Anthony Bilodeau shot and killed the two hunters.
Video footage of the fatal encounter between the men, retrieved from a nearby gas station, shows Bilodeau shooting Sansom once in the chest. He shot Cardinal three times in the shoulder.
The defence denied race played a role in the killing and instead framed the encounter as one of self-defence, arguing that Anthony Bilodeau arrived at the scene and saw his father fighting with one of the men and his younger brother in the truck calling for help.
According to testimony in court, Sansom smashed the passenger window of Roger Bilodeau’s truck and then allegedly attacked Roger and his teenage son.
When he arrived, Anthony Bilodeau told the court he shot Sansom because the man ran towards him and heard Sansom call out to Cardinal to grab a firearm so they could “kill him”.
Anthony Bilodeau testified he then shot Cardinal after seeing the man with a large gun with a magazine attached and said Cardinal was going to kill him in retaliation for shooting Sansom.
The prosecution said it was Bilodeau who first produced a weapon and brought a weapon to a scene he didn’t know would be violent, suggesting he planned to escalate and use deadly force.
Bilodeau also admitted in court that neither he nor his father reported the deaths to the police. He also had his truck altered to evade suspicion.
The defence says it was “very disappointed” with the result and would appeal the guilty verdict. Lawyers will meet again on 17 June to discuss sentencing.