In the 1990s and early 2000s, police in Saskatoon, Canada often left people in the cold so they freeze to dea*th

In the 1990s and early 2000s, police in Saskatoon, Canada often left people in the cold so they freeze to dea*th

On November 29, 1990, the body of 17-year-old Neil Stonechild was found face down in a field across the street from a manufacturing center five miles north of Saskatoon's city center. That night, the temperature had dropped to -18 degrees Fahrenheit, but Stonechild was dressed only in a T-shirt and jeans along with a lightweight jacket and just one shoe.

The last time anyone had seen Stonechild was five days earlier — when he was handcuffed in the backseat of a police cruiser with blood streaming down his face. And the last thing a friend remembers him saying was, "Help me. They're going to ki*ll me."

According to the Saskatoon police department's official report, Stonechild d*ied of hypothermia after getting drunk and walking away from a party in order to turn himself in at a police station for an open warrant.

But that version of events never made sense to those who saw Stonechild already in custody just before he vanished.

And it wouldn't be until two more strikingly similar deaths occurred a decade later that investigators determined that the two officers who picked up Stonechild had intentionally driven him miles outside of town before abandoning him to die in sub-zero temperatures.

The Saskatoon freezing deaths involved Indigenous Canadians in and immediately outside Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, in the 1990s and early 2000s, and are suspected of being linked to actions by the members of the Saskatoon Police Service. The police officers would arrest Indigenous people, who were usually male, for alleged drunkenness and/or disorderly behaviour, sometimes without cause.

The officers would then drive them to the outskirts of the city at night in the winter, and abandon them, leaving them stranded in sub-zero temperatures.

The practice is known as taking Indigenous people for "starlight tours" and dates back to at least 1976.  As of 2021, despite convictions for related offences, no police officer has been convicted specifically for having caused freezing deaths

Victims who died from hypothermia include Rodney Naistus, Lawrence Wegner, and Neil Stonechild. Naistus and Wegner died in 2000, and their bodies were discovered on the outskirts of Saskatoon. Inquests in 2001 and 2002 into their deaths determined they were due to hypothermia.

The inquest jury's recommendations all related to police policies and indigenous-police relations.[6] Neil Stonechild's body was found on November 29, 1990, in a field outside Saskatoon, which had led to an Inquiry Into Matters Relating to the Death of Neil Stonechild. On the night of Stonechild's disappearance, five days prior on November 24, 1990, the temperature reached −28.1 °C (−18.6 °F)[9] The 2003 inquest could not determine the circumstances that led to his death.

In January 2000, Darrell Night was dropped off on the outskirts of Saskatoon but was able to call a taxi from the nearby Queen Elizabeth Power Station. The two officers involved, constables Dan Hatchen and Ken Munson of the Saskatoon Police Service, claimed they had simply given Night a ride home and dropped him off at his own request, but were convicted of unlawful confinement in September 2001 and sentenced to eight months in prison.  Yet investigations into the deaths of Wegner and Naistus were deemed "inconclusive."

The Saskatoon police initially insisted these were isolated incidents. But in 2003, police chief Russell Sabo admitted that there was a possibility that the force had been dumping First Nations people outside the city for years, after revealing that in 1976 an officer was disciplined for taking an indigenous woman to the outskirts of the city and abandoning her there.

On April 21, 2018, Ken Thomas alleged that he was picked up by two Saskatoon Police officers and dropped off outside city limits at night in the cold. This accusation was investigated by the Public Complaints Commission, which stated that it was unfounded. In a news release, Saskatoon Police chief Troy Cooper said it was unlikely that there was contact on the night of April 21, 2018, between the police and Mr. Thomas, based on video and audio recordings taken from police cars.

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