It is dark when Stanley Carl Jonathan, 57, wakes at 5 a.m. in his modest ranch house on the Six Nations of the Grand River reserve.

Stan has hunted on Six Nations — Ohsweken — land since he was a kid. To him, carrying a rifle comes as naturally as toting a hockey stick.

Stan is a legend on the reserve. He was born here on Sept. 5, 1955. He is the local boy who made it big.

His hockey nickname was Bulldog and he was an enforcer. As tough as it gets. He was also one of just a handful of native players at the time to make it as a pro.

The fearless left winger was 17 when he played for the Peterborough Petes in the Ontario Hockey League.

"I went to Peterborough and I got homesick the first week," Stan once told a newspaper reporter. "When you wander off from your community into the white man's world, you don't know if people are going to be for you or against you."

In 1975 he was drafted in the fifth round to the Boston Bruins where he was coached by Don Cherry. He fit in nicely with the coach's "lunch pail" personality.

He played 411 games for the Bruins, racking up 91 goals, 110 assists and 751 penalty minutes.

He finished out his career with the Pittsburgh Penguins in 1983 then returned home to Six Nations, working in construction, playing in charity hockey games, coaching, running a tent-rental business, driving a snow plow and enjoying his leisure time.

"I'm hunting and fishing," he told the Barrie Advance in 2006 just before playing in an NHL old-timers game. "That's the thing I missed when I was playing hockey."

Now, on this winter morning six years later, Stan is anxious to get hunting.

He finally gets into his Chevy pickup and drives straight down his road, Third Line. The concession is flanked by homes, pastures and the fire station. It is anchored at the far end by the belching CGC Hagersville gypsum plant.

It is Remembrance Day and unseasonably warm. He drives toward the sunrise.

Peter Joseph Kosid — PJ to those who've known him since he was a kid — gets up before dawn on this Sunday morning leaving his fiancée, Sabina Marrone, asleep.

She always insists he wake her for a goodbye kiss before heading out hunting. This time though, he lets her sleep. Life is exhausting when you have two small children.

He dresses in camouflage pants, a black hooded jacket, camo gun boots and grabs his camo backpack and bow before leaving their Hamilton Mountain home quietly so as not to wake the children — Ava, 4, and Robbie, their five-month-old son. He makes the 35-minute drive to Third Line on Six Nations and parks his GMC pickup in the driveway of his Hydro One co-worker S'Hagoweheh — Weheh — Myers.

Peter, just days away from his 29th birthday, is here to bow-hunt deer. He and Weheh have been out together a dozen times before, but this morning Weheh is going to his son's hockey tournament, so Peter is out alone.

The field beside Weheh's home is a good spot for deer. The scraps of corn provide food, a drainage ditch provides water and the woods provide shelter. Still, Peter has not bagged a deer. Ever.

He believes that is about to change. He texted his mom earlier in the week and told her he caught images of deer in the field with a camera he set up.

Peter has always been an outdoorsy guy.

Born in Hamilton, he grew up on the West Mountain and went to Westdale Secondary School.

"As kids, my dad would take us on hikes on the Bruce Trail," recalls his older brother, Brad Kosid. "PJ liked to run around in the forest."

Peter, the gregarious sibling, discovers fishing at age 7, catching frogs for bait. By 10 he has a red bow he practices with in the backyard. He is a good shot. He posts ads around the neighbourhood saying he can exterminate squirrels for $1 a critter. There are no takers.

He loves to hike and camp, eventually going to Lindsay's Sir Sandford Fleming College for forestry.

With a sense of adventure and a dash of wanderlust, Peter moves to British Columbia to take a forestry job. Brad tells of his brother taking a road trip from there down to California to visit an aunt and uncle.

"He showed up at their home at 3 o'clock in the morning. He didn't want to wake them so he pitched a hammock in the park across the street. Someone called the cops."

Work is scarce out west, so in the fall of 2009 he returns to Ontario, moving in with Brad and his fiancée. Peter helps with renos to the house and finds work tree trimming for the City of Mississauga.

Every chance, he grabs his fishing gear and goes out for a few hours. And he hunts. Always with a bow. He never owns a gun.

"I know he got a turkey with a bow," says Brad. "It might have been the first thing he actually killed on his own and ate. He made turkey soup."

Peter's ultimate goal is to shoot a deer. He loves venison.

In the fall of 2010, Peter has back problems and starts going to a massage therapist. Her name is Sabina.

"He had the worst back ever," says Sabina. "From climbing trees."

He quickly becomes her favourite client, this cute guy with arms covered in tattoos of trees, a waterfall, a bass and a wolf.

At his last treatment, Peter asks Sabina out, but she is very conscious of their professional relationship and turns him down. Eventually, he sways her. Their first date is just before Christmas. They watch a movie, eat pizza, talk and fall in love.

"It was just perfect," she says. "The way he looked at me just made me melt."

They become inseparable. Sabina likes to learn new things, so Peter teaches her to fish. They camp and hike and get up before dawn to catch bass.

"He fell hard for Sabina," confirms Brad. "She was definitely special ... He was the happiest I've ever seen him."

A month after they start dating, Sabina and Peter decide to buy a house together.

Peter's credit is bad though, because of his years struggling out west. So the mortgage is in Sabina's name alone. The bank assures her, she says, that Peter is covered in the mortgage insurance policy. That is critical because of his dangerous job, her lack of benefits due to being self-employed, and the fact they are raising Ava, Sabina's daughter from a previous relationship.

Sabina and Peter Kosid. Supplied photo "He treated her like his daughter," Sabina says.

In April 2011 Peter lands his dream job as an arborist with Hydro One, which takes him into the woods and gives him a pension and benefits. But the good news keeps coming. Sabina is pregnant.

On March 17, 2012, Robbie is born and Peter is ecstatic. Photos show the proud dad kissing little baby toes and beaming.

Peter and Sabina plan their wedding for the next year at the Scottish Rite in Hamilton. They draw up a guest list.

Life is good for Peter. Things are falling into place.

At Thanksgiving, the growing clan gathers for dinner and Brad gives his kid brother some advice. He tells him he needs to spend a little less time out hunting and more time at home with Sabina and the children. He is a family man now.

As Stan drives down Third Line, he looks to his left and believes he spots a deer standing in the middle of Frank Montour's field.

"So I went by it and I turned around at, ah, the old Bob Lickers' place and come back by and it had got to the bush already," Stan would tell police a few hours later.

Stan turns around again and eyes the field for a third time.

He pulls his truck into a small lane at the front of the field, where there is a rusty metal gate.

"I pulled in and I could still see it standing. Standing. It had got around the corner of there and, and I, I pulled out my gun and shot."

At the Six Nations Police station later that morning, in a videotaped statement, Stan would provide more detail about those moments.

The deer, he tells police, was standing about 135 metres away when he saw it the first time. "I could see the horns."

By the time he parked, it was farther back.

"It was hidden, it was hidden up, up the fence line," Stan says. "There's a little corner there and it was going up the fence line."

"I got out and, and I loaded my gun."

He figures the buck was now about 200 metres away. "I got a range finder, but I never ranged it," he says.

He stands at the side of the road, looks through his scope, he says, and fires. Once.

He does not go to the deer.

"Yeah, you're supposed to wait a little bit if you think you hit something," he tells police. "You don't want it to run too far and just, you just, ah, give it some time."

Stan gets back into his truck and drives east to the last railway tracks. He pulls over there and texts his brother Keith.

On Keith's phone it comes up as a text from Junior, his nickname for Stan.

"deer down Frank Montoue field across road in corn. See if ok to drive in corn." It is time-stamped at 7:03 a.m.

He immediately gets a reply.

"K," texts Keith at 7:04 a.m.

Stan knocks on Frank's door, across the road from the field. Frank tells him to go ahead and get the deer, but it's too muddy for the truck. He'd be better off taking the ATV to haul out the carcass.

Stan drives home, loads his ATV onto a trailer and drives back to the field where Keith is waiting.

It has now been about an hour since Stan fired his shot.

The Jonathan brothers hop on the ATV and head into the field.

This is the spot where Peter likes to bow hunt. He and Weheh have set up here before.

Slung over his left shoulder are a small, folding stool and his old compound bow. Over his right shoulder hangs his backpack, containing his gloves, an extra jacket and deer calls. He is facing north, away from the road, as though walking into the trees to set up. This is the best of both worlds: sheltered and quiet enough that deer come here to feast on the remains of the year's corn crop, but also just a short jaunt to Third Line. The hum and headlights of an occasional car are easily detected from Peter's hunting post.

Sometime in that small window of time before 7 a.m. when the sky is lightening, a single shot rings out.

Weheh hears it just after he gets out of bed. Const. Arnold Jacobs of the Six Nations Police hears it at his home a half-kilometre away.

"I remembered that I was making coffee, prior to going into work, and I was just pouring it and I could hear a gunshot go off at about maybe 10 to seven, five to seven."

Jacobs doesn't think anything of it because "there are hunters there all the time."

The bullet races past the rusty gate, over the pale corn stalks to where the tree line juts into the far corner of the field.

Whether the bullet passes through a deer is a point scientists, police and lawyers will later debate.

What is known for sure, thanks to a forensic pathologist's autopsy, is the bullet pierces Peter's backpack, carrying some of that fabric with it when it enters his lower back, 44 inches up his body.

There is minimal bruising around the entrance wound and no soot or gunpowder, because he has been shot from a great distance.

The bullet moves through skin, fat, muscle and lodges in his spinal column between his T3 and T4 vertebrae. The bullet explodes when it hits bone and fragments enter various tissues. They tear the aorta in half, lodge in the vena cava, penetrate the liver and ricochet into the abdominal cavity. The bullet breaks into so many pieces they cannot all be found.

There are no exit wounds.

"This death would have occurred very rapidly and Mr. Kosid stood no chance of recovering from this," Dr. John Fernandes will tell a court nearly two years later.

Peter falls to the ground, face up, his backpack underneath him, his bow at his side. Corn stalks under his body soak up blood.

The backpack is tested at the Centre of Forensic Sciences in Toronto and a report concludes "no white tailed deer DNA was detected around the alleged bullet holes on the victim's backpack."

The scientist concludes "she just doesn't have the ability to give that opinion as to whether she would expect DNA to be on the backpack if it had passed through the deer."

There is no way to know for sure if there was a deer in the field.

The field on 3rd Line in Oshweken where Stan Jonathan accidentally shot and killed Peter Kosid. Scott Gardner, The Hamilton Spectator Stan and Keith get to the spot where they expect the deer to be. Or at least where there would be signs a deer had been wounded.

But they find something else.

"It was a man. A man was laying there," Stan tells police in an emotional interview two hours later at the Six Nations Police station. "Geez, I just, I just ... I still don't believe it. It's so bad. I went over to him. I walked around for a minute and then Keith, he said 'Check him,' and I went over and put my hand on his arm and his hand ... I could see his face, but I felt that he was cold and ... we got on the cellphones, start trying to call. Call for help ... I don't know him. I don't recognize him ... I closed his eyes. They were still open."

Stan and Keith say a prayer for the hunter.

"There's no safety colours — a hat or vest — and he was all camouflage," Stan tells police. He says he didn't see a hunter's car at the gate, where they usually park.

At 7:46 a.m., first responders are dispatched to the scene. As police, firefighters and paramedics begin to arrive, two things are certain: there is no chance of saving the felled hunter, and Ohsweken's hockey hero is devastated.

Weheh notices the commotion in the field and walks over. He doesn't see Peter's body, but tells police it must be his friend on the ground there.

One officer notes he does not smell alcohol on Stan's breath.

At the police station, Stan still wears his hunting clothes. A grainy video that begins at 10:18 a.m. shows him being interviewed for 55 minutes by Const. Jacobs.

Jacobs cautions he may be charged with careless use of a firearm — "ah, that'd be the minimum" — or criminal negligence causing death — "that's the maximum."

As Stan describes finding PJ, he breaks down, sobbing so hard the officer brings him tissues. Stan tries to retrieve the texts with his brother but is too distraught, passing his phone to Jacobs instead.

"I've hunted all my life, you know, and safety, safety, safety."

He says he's tried to teach his grandchildren "the right way to do things" while hunting.

"Can I write something or say something to the family?" implores Stan. "I mean, he's got a wife. 'I'm so sorry,' something like that?"

As the interview winds down, Jacobs is concerned about Stan. He offers him the help of a counsellor and arranges for someone to drive him home and stay with him.

Three days later, Stan is charged with criminal negligence causing death. A conviction would come with a sentence of four years to life in prison. Later, he is additionally charged with careless use of a firearm, which could bring a fine up to $25,000 or up to two years in prison, or both. The charge includes every person who uses a firearm "in a careless manner or without reasonable precautions for the safety of other persons."

Stan gets bail with a $10,000 surety.

Brad Kosid at the field in Oshweken where his brother, Peter Kosid, was killed by Stan Jonathan in a hunting accident. Barry Gray, The Hamilton Spectator The first thing Sabina does when she wakes around 8:30 a.m. is text Peter from bed.

"Morning, love. I hope you are having fun. Hurry home. I miss you."

She sends more texts, increasingly desperate, as the morning turns into afternoon.

Brad Kosid is on his roof in the early afternoon, taking advantage of the 10-degree-Celsius temperatures to put up Christmas lights. Then his wife comes to tell him to phone his mother immediately.

"Mom was hysterical," Brad says. "I don't even know what she was saying. So I was like, 'So, he's hurt?'"

Details of Peter's death unfold as the reeling family gathers at Sabina and Peter's house. Until now, Brad has never heard of Stan Jonathan.

A few days later, Peter's celebration of life is held at the Scottish Rite, the beautiful Queen Street South landmark where he and Sabina intended to marry.

Stan's preliminary hearing takes place in a Brantford courtroom over three days in September and October 2014. He is represented by Dean Paquette, one of Hamilton's top criminal lawyers.

The purpose of a preliminary hearing, or prelim, is for the judge to decide if there is enough evidence to commit the matter to trial. The threshold that must be met for a trial to be ordered is far lower than the "beyond a reasonable doubt" threshold that is necessary for a criminal conviction.

Peter's family is in the courtroom.

The defence and the Crown attorney, George Orsini, agree the bullet fired by Stan killed Peter and that Stan did not intend to kill him.

There the agreed facts end.

The position of Orsini is that Stan failed to be sure there was no person in his line of fire the day Peter was killed, that he could have done more — scanned the area with his scope, waited and watched — to be certain.

Orsini also suggests there may not have been a deer in Stan's trajectory at all. That what Stan saw out in the field was, in fact, Peter.

Paquette takes the position his client fired a shot that went straight through a white tail deer and into Peter who was out of sight behind the buck. He argues his client was hunting carefully — sighting the deer three times before firing — but simply had no way of knowing a camouflaged hunter was in the field.

Witnesses called include half a dozen Six Nations Police and OPP officers; a forensic pathologist; Peter's friend Weheh Myers; a firearms safety expert; Martin Clifford MacDonald, a Six Nations resident who says he saw a possibly injured deer down the road from the hunting accident soon after PJ died.

Most witnesses swear on the Bible or solemnly affirm that their testimony is the truth. Some native witnesses choose to testify while holding an eagle feather.

"The eagle feather symbolizes our direct connection to the Creator for my people and I hold it in the spirit of truth," they recite.

All the Six Nations witnesses know who Stan Jonathan is. Several are close friends, others are acquaintances.

Const. Blaine Martin and Insp. Darren Montour of Six Nations Police each tell the court they did not look at the ground to see if there were deer tracks as they tried to help Peter.

The first rule of hunting safety is "target identification," the court hears from Brian Barker, a former Hamilton cop who is a federal firearm safety instructor and provincial Hunter Education Instructor. "You have to identify what your target is and what is beyond your target in case you miss your target."

"You need to be 100 per cent sure of your target," Barker says, adding he has sometimes had to sit for a long time before firing to be absolutely sure.

Insp. Montour tells the court he has been friends with Stan for 30 years.

"As far as I was concerned, he was one of the safe hunters on Six Nations."

The last hour of the prelim begins with Orsini's final submission: "There is evidence of criminal negligence and there is also evidence of careless use of a firearm. I'll be asking for a committal on both."

Then Paquette and Justice Robert Gee become engaged in an extraordinary and sometimes heated debate over the legal definitions of "negligence" and "careless" as applied to the events on Third Line.

"Your theory is the deer was between Mr. Jonathan and Mr. Kosid, correct?" says Gee.

"Yes. And that the bullet travelled through the deer and struck Mr. Kosid," responds Paquette.

"But in those circumstances, isn't the jury able to draw that Mr. Jonathan saw something back there, instantly thought it was the deer — because two previous times he saw it — and he fired without making sure?"

"I say no. Because the evidence is he had the deer in his sights and it was a deer and it had eight points and it was a deer."

"But doesn't that require the jury to accept the testimony of Mr. Jonathan?"

"There's no evidence that undermines him. There's no evidence that contradicts him."

"Except that Mr. Kosid's dead."

"Yes, because a bullet passed through the deer and struck Mr. Kosid who was beyond the deer wearing camouflage that made it extremely difficult to see him."

Eventually, Orsini re-enters the debate to attack Paquette's theory of the wounded deer.

"The suggestion that the bullet somehow passed through the deer so close to Mr. Kosid that it got him in the back is, I'm going to suggest, comical," the Crown says. "It's almost a situation where you would think the deer's hunting Mr. Kosid, he's so close to him. I mean, it's not like Mr. Kosid is facing the deer and they're shooting the same target. He got hit in the back."

In the end, on Oct. 29, 2014, Justice Gee commits Stan Jonathan to stand trial for criminal negligence causing death and careless use of a firearm.

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Hunting on a reserve is completely different from hunting in the rest of Ontario.

Provincial hunting regulations do not apply to natives hunting on their own territorial land. And extra rules apply to non-natives hunting on the reserve, such as needing to be in the company of a native or have permission from the band council to hunt on the reserve.

"Lots of rules don't matter out there," Weheh tells the court when asked about hunting on the reserve.

The cruel irony is that it was Peter, not Stan, who was in violation of hunting regulations on the day he died. While the rules applied to Peter — because he was non-native — none of the rules applied to Stan — because he was native and hunting on native land.

Natives hunting on their own territorial land do not require a hunting licence and do not have to take the Hunter Education Course. However they must pass the federal Firearms Safety Course in order to legally purchase a gun.

It is unclear what hunter training and education Stan Jonathan has.

Non-native hunters must pass both the federal and provincial courses in order to acquire their mandatory licence from the Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry (MNRF).

"We don't have jurisdiction on the reserves around hunting for First Nations people living on the reserve," says MNRF spokesperson Jolanta Kowalski.

MNRF conservation officers do not go onto the reserves, she says.

Deer hunting season in southern Ontario goes from October until the end of December.

In southern Ontario, it is illegal for non-natives to hunt deer with a rifle, says Barker, the safety instructor. Rifles can shoot long distances which makes the potential for accidents higher in the heavily populated portions of the province. It is bow hunting only for most of the season, except a two-week "open gun season" during which a shotgun or muzzle loader can be used and bow hunting is not allowed. The time frames for gun hunting and bow hunting in southern Ontario do not overlap.

However none of those regulations apply to natives hunting on a reserve. They can use whatever weapon they want, including rifles, whenever they want. Though Jonathan was hunting with a rifle in southern Ontario, the rules did not apply to him.

On Nov. 11, 2012 — the day Peter was shot — gun hunting season was underway in southern Ontario. Which means Peter should not have been bow hunting.

On the stand Weheh was asked about hunting rules on Six Nations.

"On the res? Just common sense rules, I guess ... Look where you're shooting. Be aware of your area. Wear orange if you need to, I guess. You should — for reasons like this."

Neither Peter nor Stan wore orange on the fateful day.

Off the reserve, hunters are required to wear bright "hunter orange" clothing measuring 400 square inches above their waist, visible from all sides, plus a hunter orange head cover during gun season. During bow season, the orange is not a requirement.

Barker testifies at the prelim that deer do not see colour the way we do and it is a good practice to wear some hunter orange even in bow season.

Weheh tells the prelim he warned Peter about others hunting in the same field.

"They like to shoot from the road," he says. "We've got to be careful."

Sabina struggles to pull her shattered life together.

She is raising two young children on her own. Ava is now 7, Robbie is 3. She tries to work, but it is difficult. Her father, former Tiger-Cat Tone Marrone, moves in to help. (Coincidentally, Peter's dad, Bob Kosid also played in the CFL, with the Saskatchewan Roughriders.)

Because the house is in her name only, Peter was not, in fact, covered by their mortgage insurance. So mortgage payments continue. Peter's life insurance paid off their debt but that was all.

As the criminal case against Stan crawls toward a trial, Peter's family learns about the way insurance works.

Hunting accidents are generally covered by standard house insurance policies.

"Unless there's a specific exclusion in the policy, you'd be covered," says Pete Karageorgos, director of consumer industry relations at the Insurance Bureau of Canada. The big exception to that is if the "criminal act exclusion" applies. You cannot be covered for an incident if you have committed a criminal offence in relation to the incident.

Stan has a home insurance policy that covers him for hunting accidents.

But after he is charged, his insurance company informs him his policy is null and void if he is convicted.

"Stan Jonathan was told insurance wouldn't cover him because of the criminality of the event," confirms his lawyer, Paquette.

That means if Sabina was to sue Stan for damages, he would have little money to sue for. Despite his NHL career, he is a man of modest means.

However if he is not convicted of a criminal offence, his insurance could pay out.

How much is paid out is determined by the standard claim investigation done by the insurance company, says Karageorgos.

"Liability has to be proven in a judgment against you," he says. "And the deceased may have contributed by the fact they weren't wearing reflective clothing, for instance."

Sabina might be able to sue for enough to ease the financial burden she — and her two children — face.

There is a meeting between Crown attorney George Orsini and Peter's family, including Sabina and Brad. They discuss the upcoming trial and Orsini tells the family there is a slim chance of conviction.

In September 2014, lawyer Bruce Hillyer files a statement of claim on behalf of Sabina, the children, Peter's parents and brother. They are suing Stan Jonathan for negligence for a combined total of $1.4 million.

The court document lists the many ways in which it claims Stan was negligent, such as "he fired his weapon when he did not have visual confirmation or proper identification of what he was aiming/shooting at."

It also points to more specific allegations of acts of negligence, such as: "he fired his weapon from a motorized vehicle contrary to the Rules and Regulations of Safe Hunting," "there was insufficient daylight," "he was hunting with an unregistered firearm," "he was not wearing corrective vision glasses," "he knew or ought to have known that he was unfit to be hunting or using a weapon and/or was impaired by alcohol, illicit drugs or medication," "he failed to use a telescopic sight."

None of those allegations have been proven in court. Statements of claim are notorious for casting a wide net in the hope of catching some wrongdoing that can be proven.

"I have made my reputation turning over rocks for 42 years," says Hillyer.

A statement of defence was filed by Stan's civil attorney, Peter Sheppard of Toronto. None of the statements made in the document have been proven in court.

It says "the defendant spotted a deer off of Third Line Road and discharged his firearm following which Peter Kosid was struck by a bullet and killed."

It goes on to say "the defendant pleads that at all material times his firearm was properly registered and that he was hunting in accordance with all required permits, or, in the alternative, that he was not required to obtain or possess such permits given his Native status."

Then it says the damages stemming from Peter's death "were caused or contributed to by the negligence of the later Peter Kosid." It lists 10 particulars, including: he didn't have permission of the band council to be on the reserve or hunt there despite being required to do so; he was not wearing hunter orange; he failed to keep a proper lookout; he failed to take reasonable and appropriate precautions for his own safety to warn other hunters of his presence.

"I will not be speaking to this matter," Sheppard said when contacted by The Spectator.

It's April 2, 2015 and Stan Jonathan's trial is scheduled to begin in a Brantford courtroom.

Justice Alan Whitten is presiding.

But Stan is not present. Neither is his lawyer, who has sent someone else from his office instead.

The Crown stands up and addresses the court.

He asks for the charges of criminal negligence causing death and careless use of a firearm against Stan to be withdrawn.

This is George Orsini, the same Crown who, just five months earlier, argued vehemently that Stan ought to be tried. Whose theory was there may not have been a deer at all in Stan's line of fire. And it should be up to a judge or a jury to decide.

"I've since reviewed the case law," he now tells the court. "I've spoken with the family of Mr. Kosid and in the circumstances, it is the Crown's position there is no reasonable prospect of conviction, leaving aside the issue of civil negligence. This is not a case in which, in my respectful view, there is sufficient evidence to meet the test of reasonable prospect of conviction for criminal negligence. And it is with that in mind, as well I might add, with the consent of the family of Mr. Kosid, that the Crown is ultimately not going to be proceeding with this matter and we ask that it be marked 'withdrawn.'"

So it begs the question: Did something change after the preliminary hearing that led Orsini to believe he no longer had a chance of conviction?

Orsini did not respond to repeated interview requests from The Hamilton Spectator.

Instead, The Spectator was asked to submit questions to Ministry of the Attorney General spokesperson Brendan Crawley. The Spectator did submit a list of eight detailed questions, seven of which went unanswered.

Crawley did provide an answer to the question of what happened between the preliminary hearing and the first day of the trial to lead to the withdrawal of charges: "In all criminal matters, the proper administration of justice requires that Crown counsel assess the prosecution at every stage of the proceedings and Crown counsel is duty-bound to withdraw the charges if there is no reasonable prospect of conviction, or if it is not in the public interest to proceed," he wrote. "In this case, the Crown carefully considered the totality of the circumstances of the case, including the evidence and witness testimony heard at the preliminary hearing, as well as the applicable legal principles and case law. Following this comprehensive review, the Crown determined that there was no longer a reasonable prospect of conviction."

Paquette (who was once a Crown attorney) says the test to determine if a case is strong enough to stand trial is "very low" compared to the test of a reasonable prospect of conviction.

But more to the point, his client didn't commit a crime, he says in an interview.

"A terrible accident took place. He actually shot the deer and the bullet actually went through the deer and struck Mr. Kosid ... For all intents and purposes, he was invisible to Stan Jonathan."

Paquette describes Stan as "a very kind, gentle man" who was "grief-stricken by what happened."

Stan Jonathan did not respond to numerous interview requests for this story.

He did, however, give an on-camera interview to a Boston Herald sports reporter a year after the hunting accident, while he was out on bail.

"I've got a court order not to be talking about it," Stan says, and then goes on to say: "I'm dealing with it. My family's dealing with it. I've hunted all my life. It's just a tragic accident. He was, like I said, he was on the reserve. He was fully camouflaged. I never seen him until I went to pick up the deer. And I hit the deer — that's what people have to understand. I had hit the deer. It had got up and left, had gone away, but I wasn't even worried about it afterward when we found the person."

He adds he worries about the accident when he's alone.

"That's why I thank the Lord and the Creator — who I believe in — that the grandchildren are with me. And when the grandchildren are with me they take my mind off it."

He mentions he can't hunt and "do what I want to do" — a reference to the bail conditions he was under at the time.

He thanks Boston — where he played seven seasons with the Bruins — for its support and says, several times, that "the truth will come out."

"I don't know if they're trying to make something that it's not," he says.

He acknowledges the impact Peter's death has had on his family.

"I realize on their side of the family what is taken away from them ... I didn't know him, I didn't know anything about him. I know he's got a father and mother, but I didn't know he had a wife and a little kid coming up."

Brad is torn about the legal choices that have been made.

"I don't really know that Stan Jonathan going to jail would make me feel any better," he says. "My brother's still dead."

Sitting through a trial may have been terrible. He would have to hear all the gory details of his brother's death. And it would have been covered by lots of media because of Stan's hockey history. The Boston Globe sent a reporter all the way to Ohsweken to do a story about the accident. And maybe the trial would have instigated a national debate on native hunting. Which could be a good thing, or a traumatic one, for Peter's family.

"Hunter safety needs to be taken very seriously," says Sabina. "No matter who you are, where you live — it shouldn't matter. The value of someone's life should be the most important thing."

Stan can still own a gun and hunt whenever he likes.

"The Crown did, ultimately, what was in our best interest, not the best interest of the public," believes Brad.

The Crown's job is, in fact, to act on behalf of the public. But no helpful explanation has been offered as to why the Crown withdrew the charges.

Professor Alan Young, of Osgoode Hall Law School, says Crowns have no legal obligation to explain their decision to withdraw a charge. But he would argue they have a "moral duty." The public, and the family of the victim, have a right to know.

But they likely never will.

Young tested that premise when he represented Kristen and Mark Gilbank after the Crown withdrew criminal charges against the man accused of murdering their parents in Ancaster.

After an extraordinarily long bail hearing, the Crown suddenly dropped the charges, citing no reasonable chance of conviction.

Young went all the way to then-attorney general Michael Bryant seeking an explanation.

He got none. The Gilbanks' case remains unsolved.

Examinations for discovery in the lawsuit against Stan are scheduled to begin in April in Hamilton.

"The only real remedy for the family is a civil suit," says Hillyer, the civil lawyer.

"A trial wouldn't have brought Peter back," says Sabina, weeping. "Even just sitting through the prelim was awful because thinking about why this happened and how it could have been avoided makes me upset because we did have everything. We had the world. And now I'm left with a hole in my heart that will never be filled."

"I miss him every day."

Robbie is nearly 4 now.

Last summer he won a fishing derby in Burlington. And he can shoot a bow.

He recognizes his daddy's face from photographs scattered about his home.

"Daddy is in heaven," he says.

When he is older, he may go to the field where his daddy died. Where there is a small wooden cross — and an arrow — marking the spot where two hunters intersected for a fraction of a second and changed lives forever.