When an RCMP officer got a call reporting an unmanned boat going in circles on a lake in north-central Saskatchewan, he thought it was funny.
“Lol some guy just called the office saying there is an empty boat just ripping around in circles on Weyakwin Lake,” Const. Andrew Wood wrote in a text message to Const. Matthew Riedel.
Their texts are quoted in a report by the RCMP’s civilian watchdog, the Civilian Review and Complaints Commission (CRCC).
The two officers talked about how they weren’t sure what to do.
“Shoot it?” Wood texted.
“Could shoot a hole in it,” Riedel messaged. “I see we’re of like mind lol.”
Bystander video shows boat going in circles on Weyakwin Lake
While the police were joking about the boat, James and Helen Hamm were standing on the shore of Weyakwin Lake, anxiously waiting for their son Matthew to return from his trip to catch some fish for supper.
The 24-year-old had launched his boat around 6 p.m. CST, and his parents expected him back before sunset, which was at 6:58 p.m. that day — Sept. 23, 2020. Helen tried phoning Matthew around 6:30 p.m. to see if he had caught any fish, but the call didn’t go through.
“Our thoughts were, he was out of gas, and that he’s out of service, that he couldn’t phone us, that we’d find him out of gas,” Helen said. “But that wasn’t the thing this time.”
He never returned. His body was found in the lake the following spring.
As the Hamms were fuelling up another boat to go out and look for Matthew around 8:15 p.m., they saw an RCMP truck pull up to the public dock nearby for a minute or two, then leave. They didn’t know that it was Const. Riedel following up on the spinning boat report, which had come in around 7:30 p.m.
“When you find a boat with the motor running, you know [that] somebody was in that boat not long ago,” James said.
“I think I could have probably sent one of my teenage grandchildren down to the dock and they would have done a better job than that RCMP did.”
Matthew’s family and neighbours in the Ramsey Bay subdivision on Weyakwin Lake searched for him — but during those first few crucial hours, they looked in the wrong places.
“We did go out and look for him, but we went to look where he said he was going and that’s not where the boat was found,” James said.
“So we weren’t looking in the right place. If somebody would have let us know where the boat was found, we could have been looking in the right place.”
RCMP find body of man reported missing on Weyakwin Lake
At 10:30 p.m., a neighbour called the RCMP detachment in Montreal Lake to report Matthew was overdue from his fishing trip. Wood called back and learned that two groups were already out searching for him.
Wood met Riedel at Ramsey Bay shortly after midnight and learned Matthew was still missing.
At 12:51 a.m., Wood phoned his supervisor, Const. Tara Mol, and told her about the unmanned boat and Matthew being overdue.
Mol instructed Wood to call the pontoon boat passenger for more information, then she started putting search and rescue operations into motion.
RCMP missteps leave Sask. family with unanswered questions about son’s death
James ultimately made a formal complaint about the investigation to the CRCC, which issued its final report earlier this year, calling the RCMP’s initial response “wholly unacceptable.”
“Ultimately, the commission finds that constables Wood and Riedel incomprehensibly failed to grasp the possibility that the unmanned boat represented a lost or missing person and respond in a reasonable manner,” the report said.
“Instead they joked about shooting the boat in a wildly inappropriate manner, mounted an ill-informed response, and made other serious missteps.”
The CRCC said “it will never be known” whether a more timely and professional response could have saved Matthew, but the “initial failures delayed the search during the most critical period following Matthew’s disappearance, especially given the frigid water temperature in the lake.”
The water was about 11 C that day, and the range of time before hypothermia sets in in water at that temperature is one to six hours, the report noted.
The CRCC recommended the RCMP consider disciplining Wood and Riedel and give them more training. The RCMP would not confirm whether the constables were disciplined, citing the Privacy Act.
The commission also recommended the RCMP apologize to the Hamms. The RCMP confirmed the commanding officer of the Saskatchewan RCMP sent a letter of apology by registered mail.
James Hamm said the apology isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.
And he still has a lot of unanswered questions.
The RCMP and other agencies — including the Montreal Lake Search and Rescue, the Canadian Rangers, the Civil Air Search and Rescue Association, the RCMP’s underwater recovery team, the Hutterian Emergency Aquatic Response Team (HEART) and volunteer community groups — searched the lake for Matthew until winter set in.
In the spring, on May 12, 2021, searchers found Matthew’s body under the ice, “in an advanced state of decomposition,” according to the coroner’s report. He was not wearing a life-jacket.
The coroner ruled the death an accidental drowning.
James got a second opinion from Dr. Jonathan Arden, a forensic pathologist in the U.S., who reviewed items including the autopsy report, coroner’s report and photographs of the scene.
Arden’s report noted that aside from Matthew’s body being found in the water, there weren’t other signs of drowning.
“His lungs were not heavy or wet at autopsy, and he did not have frothy fluid in his airways or emerging from his nose or mouth, so he did not have the most common findings of drowning,” Arden wrote.
His report also noted an area of “dark reddening” on the back of Matthew’s head.
Arden concluded that without an explanation for how drowning may have occurred, “his manner of death should have been certified as undetermined.”
James also questioned how Matthew’s body could have decomposed as much as it did in lake water that was too cold for bacteria activity.
He said the area where Matthew was found in the spring was searched extensively by the RCMP, the HEART team, and other community groups. The lake and shoreline were also scanned with sonar in the fall.
“That’s a flat-bottom lake. It was 18 feet deep there,” James said. “That body would have been so easy to find. There’s no explanation for that.”
James expressed his concerns about the cause of death in his complaint to the CRCC and submitted research from the American Society of Anesthesiologists that referred to a study of autopsied drowning victims that found 98.6 per cent of them had water in their lungs.
“While the commission recognizes Mr. Hamm’s persistence in determining what happened to his son, it did not receive any information to displace the coroner’s finding that he accidentally drowned,” the CRCC report said.
James is not satisfied.
“What I always heard from the RCMP and everybody is, ‘You’ve got to go by the evidence.’ Well, their whole thing about an accidental drowning, theirs is nothing but a theory,” he said.
“There is no sign of drowning. There’s no witness to a drowning. That’s just one big theory, actually, theirs is, with no evidence of drowning.”
James has his own theory, but said that when he shares it, people will “shy away” — so he prefers to stick to the facts and the questions that he has about them.
For instance, James said the search team that found Matthew told him that Matthew’s toque and hood were “nicely on,” and they found that unusual.
Matthew was found with his earbuds in his ears and normally would have had his cellphone “deep in his pocket,” but his phone has never been found. His phone also appeared to have received a text message hours after Matthew went missing.
Matthew was an experienced boater, in a 16-foot-long fishing boat.
“You don’t just fall out of that boat just like that,” James said.
James said that when Matthew fished, he would always put the boat in reverse because it went too fast when it was going forward. But the boat was spotted going forward in circles.
If that spinning boat was located where the pontoon boat passengers said it was, James said, he and Helen should have been able to see it from the dock where they were watching for Matthew’s return.
In its report, the CRCC addressed James’s complaints about an incomplete investigation.
“While it will undoubtedly be a difficult conclusion for the Hamm family, none of the witness statements the commission reviewed raised the spectre of foul play or highlighted other investigative angles for the RCMP to review,” the report said.
In its final paragraphs, the commission stated, “While it will inevitably be difficult for the Hamm family to accept, the evidence in this case strongly suggests that Matthew’s death was accidental.”
James maintains that things just “don’t add up,” and the “incompetence” of the RCMP in the early hours makes him question the entire investigation.
“It all doesn’t make sense,” James said. “What I’m looking for is an investigation that should have been done to begin with. That’s what we want, try to get some answers.”
