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Robert Robinson and his mother Angie felt peace walking by the ocean on the Butze Rapids trail in Prince Rupert.

For the big 16-year-old — so severely autistic that he could not speak — the rainforest trail had become the only place he could be calm.

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At home and at school he expressed his frustration — his distance from the world — by head-butting walls, head-butting people, pushing and punching his shy, loving, 100-pound single mother.

And so Angie Robinson and her sister Michelle Watson took Robert to the five-kilometre trail every day.

On April 2 — when Angie Robinson told her sister she was too tired to make the hike because Robert had been acting up all night — something seemed wrong.

The shock for us was that she took his life

“The Butze trail was the only place where Robert and Angie could find freedom,” relative Ron Watson said in an interview. “Angie loved him more than anything on Earth. The shock for us was that she took his life.”