Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Deline (Aug 06/01) - Hours after they went fishing together, Leonard Kenny found himself by his dying brother's side, holding Brian's hand as the life spilled away.

His voice heavy with grief, Kenny spoke last week about the day his brother died. He and Brian were the eldest in their family. Brian was 35, just a year younger than Kenny, and the two were close.

Saturday night, they'd gone fishing with Leonard's youngest son and they'd caught lake trout and grayling. "We spent about five hours together -- that's the last time I saw him, until the morning."

That was the morning of July 29, the morning that - according to police - Brian was outside a house in the centre of town where a drinking party had been held the night before.

Earlier, a drunken Jack Betsidea had gotten into an argument with some of the people at the party.

At about 8 a.m., he returned with a shotgun. He shot and killed Brian, and another man, Ryan Tetso, 25. Then Betsidea fired at the RCMP detachment next door, injuring an officer with shrapnel from the exploding window.

As the detachment's three officers were reacting, Betsidea turned the gun on himself and pulled the trigger. He was 22, too young yet to understand the infinite potential that was his own life and the lives he had extinguished.

Sunday morning, three men lay dead in the street.

That morning, the image of Brian's lifeless body was burned forever in Kenny's mind.

"I was on the scene ten minutes after it happened," he says. "I was holding his hand, his hand was still warm, and I could see blood pouring out from his head. It happened about a quarter after eight and they must have taken his body away at three and I was there all that time, holding him. I have to see his face over and over and over again.

"My father was supposed to be leaving for open heart surgery in Edmonton this week. Brian was chosen to accompany him for the surgery. My dad had his heart problems too, and when he saw what happened, he almost fell down.

"There's a lot of anger, especially for myself. But my father said, 'He's gone now we can't bring him back. We have to learn to forgive.' It's going to take time, I'm not just talking about one family -- there's other families involved. It may take weeks, six months, a year, I don't know. The process of healing takes time."

When Brian died, he left fatherless his two daughters, age eight and one, and his two teenage sons from another relationship. He left a gaping hole in his close-knit family of 10 siblings.

"Brian was doing really good for himself," Kenny said. "He talked to me just a few days before he got killed. He was talking about going to treatment, he was going to stop drinking.

"He had a small business that he started a few years ago, with movie rentals and selling pop and chips. He renovated a nice home for his business, and he bought a house and was going to fix it up.

"He was a really good trapper too. He knew the land really well, and him and my youngest brother, they went out on the land all the time. He was really independent -- he didn't ask much of people, he just did things on his own."

If it's hard for the adults of the community to make sense of a senseless killing, it's harder still for the children.

"Some of my daughters too are really close to my brother," Kenny said. "My youngest boy doesn't understand ... I told him Brian's gone and he doesn't understand. He thinks he's coming back."