A Manitoba First Nations community in distress said goodbye to a young member who died in a tragic bullying-induced drowning incident.
"He was a good boy," Harvey Owen, father of six-year-old Adam Keeper, told CTV Winnipeg on Tuesday with a trembling voice, wiping one eye as he did so.
"He used to play a lot with his bike and his Game Boy."
Adam, a resident of the Pauingassi First Nation, died Aug. 7 in Fishing Lake. He went there with three other boys aged seven to nine. Those boys bullied Adam into going into the water even though he couldn't swim.
Hours later, Owen found his son's body floating in the water.
Owen ran into the boys behind the incident that night as he went to look for his son. "I told them, 'have you seen Adam around?' and they never answered me," he said, shaking his head.
The boys who bullied Adam are too young to be charged criminally. But a police officer said they were old enough to know better.
"To intimidate (someone) and force them to do things they wouldn't normally do. By definition, that's bullying," said RCMP Sgt. Chris Ballard in Winnipeg.
However, the community did start an aboriginal healing circle to allow the families to meet and talk. That ended Tuesday morning when the boys were taken to Winnipeg, 280 kilometres to the southwest, for counselling.
Chief Harold Crow told reporters he didn't think the boys realized what they were doing. "They pick up these ideas on TV ... what happened here was real life."
Pauingassi is in an isolated location near the border with Ontario. The nearest RCMP detachment is a 30-minute boat ride away.
Keeper's death has thrown a spotlight on the community's problems with alcohol and solvent addictions, and the social problems -- such as poor parenting skills -- that ripple out from there.
"We need help. We need real help," Crow said.
In 2005, Pauingassi made headlines over the solvent abuse problem there. At that time, more than 20 per cent of the residents, including half the school-aged children, were estimated to have a solvent or alcohol abuse problem.
Crow said Keeper's death isn't directly related to substance abuse.
Since 2000, the reserve has recorded 12 suicides.
The reserve suffers from a lack of services and its remote location, Crow said.
With a report from CTV's Jill Macyshon and files from The Canadian Press
