Richard Thomas, a student at the Kuper Island Residential School of British Columbia, and one of the main subjects of the CBC documentary podcast series, was smart, kind and well-loved. He was having no problems in school and he wanted to go further in education. Then inexplicably, days before his graduation, which he was excited about, Richard was found dead in the Kuper Island school gym. He was hanging from a rafter. His death was ruled a suicide — with no further questions as to why. CBC pieced together a portrait of the teenager through his own writings, and found an old coroner’s report and police report that raised more questions than answers about how Richard Thomas died.

The day Richard’s body was found the children were in the custody of brother Dufour. The officer based his report entirely on statements from Brother Dufour. That report said Richard was upset by his parent’s divorce, which Belvie, his sister, said never happened. The police report also referred to the fact that Richard’s journals talked about death.  But remember he lived in an Indian residential school where death was common. That did not necessarily mean he wanted to die.

The reports also showed Richard was not having trouble in school and wanted to go farther in school. It did not sound like a boy ready to commit suicide, but such students don’t always act rationally.

It seems the police officer might have had tunnel vision and closed his eyes to the alternatives, besides the report of Brother Dufour.

The death was ruled a suicide. But was it?

To try to answer this question, CBC reporter McCue turned to an expert—Kona Williams. She is Cree and Mohawk. She was also the first indigenous pathologist in Canada based in northern Ontario and she was asked to review Richard’s autopsy. She has a lot of knowledge about deaths in residential schools and had a unique insight. Her father was a residential school survivor.

She said the autopsy was brief and said the cause of Richard’s death was “strangulation”. Williams said she would have described the cause of death as hanging rather than strangulation. The word “strangulation” implies that the death was done by somebody else. It was that word that led Richard’s sister Belvie to think Richard had been murdered. In the autopsy there was no indication of bruises which are typical in cases of strangulation by another person. The autopsy was very brief. Only a page. Based on that Williams could not offer an opinion on whether he had been murdered or not. The report was far from definitive. At the time it was an adequate autopsy report, but today for a death in a school there would be much more information available. Many pages more.

That does bring up the issue whether or not the investigation was inadequate. Residential school children received very poor treatment while alive. There is no reason to think an investigation after death would have been any better.

As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report showed, often families of residential school children were not even told when one of their family members had died in school. It is possible that the death of Richard was hardly investigated at all. It really would not have been surprising.

There was no indication that  authorities really wanted a thorough investigation of what happened at that school which closed in 1975. Like other schools in recent years in Canada, bodies were found buried there in graves that were unmarked. Sometimes there are good reasons to go looking farther into unmarked graves. This was one of them.