The Best American Crime Reporting 2008 by Jonathan Kellerman Page B

the winter months in British Columbia. By this time of year, tall stakes driven into the ocean floor have been connected with netting, a process sometimes called “suiting your weirs,” and people like Foster are getting up at a quarter to five every morning hoping to find the nets full of herring. The shed in back of their house has been repainted, but Foster can put his fingers in two bullet holes. At times, he has said that he wished he hadn’t been present on the night of the fights and the gunfire and the house-burning. He calls the twenty days he spent in jail awaitingbail the worst twenty days of his life. (“To me, that would have been a good enough sentence if I had done something really horrific.”) He has said that he’s haunted by the thought that he could have been killed or that he could have killed somebody else. On the other hand, he thinks that some good has come of the altercation with Ronnie Ross. “They’re talking about a center for the young people, and a paintball field,” Foster said recently. “There’s going to be some recreation for the young kids. The only recreation I had growing up was to go get drunk.”
    Many islanders would agree with Carter Foster that Grand Manan is better off than it was before he and Ronnie Ross met in the middle of Cedar Street—or will be if the grants that the village has applied for come through. That opinion is often followed by “Of course, I don’t condone violence,” but it also might be followed by the observation that a smarter way to get rid of someone like Ronnie Ross would be to wait until he was out of the house some dark night, drop in a Molotov cocktail, and “run off into the woods like a rabbit.” Although there are still drug dealers on the island, none of them are outsiders who make themselves out to be big-time gangsters. There seems to be more focus on doing something about the drug problem. Now that Terry Irvine is no longer making regular visits in one S.U.V. or another, islanders are more relaxed about leaving tools unguarded—even though no evidence was ever presented that Irvine and Ross were behind the thefts. In fact, Irvine is in jail. This spring, in St. John, he pleaded guilty to stealing several thousand dollars’ worth of goods from three Atlantic Superstores, in full view of surveillance cameras—committing what his own lawyer summed up as “a rather stupid offense.”
    And Ronald Ross is no longer a menacing presence on Grand Manan. His house is gone. Where it stood, there is simply an empty lot with some charred rubble. People see the end of his Grand Manan sojourn in varying ways. The Crown prosecutors believe, of course, that a mob put itself in the place of legally constituted authorities, while most residents of Grand Manan prefer to believe that islanders, regrettably, had to do what the R.C.M.P. seemed unwilling or unable to do. If it is true that the R.C.M.P. offered to turn a blind eye or even encouraged the violence, the legally constituted authorities could be said to have used the islanders as an unregulated auxiliary to get rid of Ronnie Ross. One resident of Cedar Street told the R.C.M.P. that, despite all the talk of drug problems, the eruption of violence was essentially part of a “personal war” between Ross and his neighbors—another way of saying that what really got Ronnie Ross put off Grand Manan was what Laura Buckley called his “asshole issues.”
    At Ross’s trial in April, he was found guilty of the “ball of fire” threat but not guilty on the gun charge. (The judge, who heard the case without a jury, said that in his opinion the islanders at Foster’s assembled not for a peaceful intervention but in the hope that something would start so that they could finish it.) Ross, who had been confined to his father’s house in Nova Scotia since the previous summer, was sentenced to time