The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman Page A

of it concerning Terry Irvine. Ross admitted using crack, but, like Irvine, he denied being a dealer. When Lutz asked him why he bought so much baking soda, an ingredient of crack (“You’re not a baker, are you? You don’t make cookies and muffins”), Ross said that he used it todeodorize his refrigerator. The one person Ross identified as having been at 61 Cedar Street while crack was being smoked was one of the men on trial for trying to burn the place down because it was a crack house. Ross, who had testified that he’d lived on Grand Manan for ten years, said that the assumption that he was a crack dealer was caused by prejudice against outsiders: “Islanders stick together. If one person doesn’t like you, no one likes you. They gossip and stories get twisted around.” As for any plans to travel around in the Yukon burning down houses on a hit list, Ross’s friends testified that they had gathered at his house that night for their usual Friday-night pastime of getting drunk or getting high. Terry Irvine, who, according to some witnesses, may have fired the first shot, testified that he’d been too drunk to remember much of anything about the evening.
    The jury found those who admitted to shooting guns that night not guilty—in his charge, the judge had said “the law doesn’t require somebody to run to the woods if they are being attacked”—but it found the two arson defendants guilty. Foster was also found guilty of the minor charge of unsafe storage of weapons, and another defendant was found guilty of firing a flare gun. The verdicts were not popular. There were tears in the courtroom, and the mood on the ferry going back to the island was sombre. The reaction softened a bit when, without objection from the Crown prosecutor, the judge handed down lenient sentences; the most severe, for the arsonists, included a form of house arrest. Editorialists tended to detect a sensible Canadian compromise between the requirements of lawfulness and mercy. “The island people were well satisfied that they didn’t go to jail,” one resident said recently. “If those boys had gone to jail for a year, I’d be scared to say what might have happened.”
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    A COUNTRY SONG about T he Boys has been posted on the Internet: “They were known as The Boys. And they were fishermen. Cared about their families. They cared about their friends. Looked out for the neighbors. Out on Grand Manan. They were known as The Boys. And they were fishermen.” Some Grand Mananers, including some of those who were willing to contribute to the defense fund, feel a bit uneasy about The Boys’ being portrayed as the equivalent of the peaceful farmers in a Western who finally rise up against the gunslingers hired by the wicked cattle baron. “They weren’t exactly the churchgoing crowd,” one islander said recently. There are, of course, some people on Grand Manan who have never felt even enough solidarity with The Boys to accept the term. (“They’re not boys. They’re grown men.”) Some volunteer firemen, for instance, were shocked at the scene on Cedar Street that night; they are understandably accustomed to a different reception when they show up, at some risk and for no pay, to save a neighbor’s house. “You can’t carry out vigilante justice,” one of them said not long ago. “If the drug dealers had had more people, Foster’s home would have been burnt out.” Such opinions, though, tend to be expressed privately.
    By now, most of the red ribbons, many of them bleached pink by the harsh Maritime winter, have been taken down. Among the last to go were three or four bright-red towels that until recently were still draped around trees in the front yard of Carter Foster and Sara Wormell. They have decided to stay in Grand Manan for the time being, although they’d like to figure out a way to spend some of