VICTORIA—One question dominated many conversations on Vancouver Island these past three weeks. Why?Why would two young men from the small city of Port Alberni have committed such senseless crimes? Three innocent lives stolen, ended on the side of remote highways in northern B.C. Why?As we all watched the hunt for Bryer Schmegelsky and Kam McLeod unfold in northern Manitoba, thousands of kilometres away, there were many theories but few clues and no answers. The pair had been friends since childhood, and they’d recently worked together at Walmart. In early July, they reportedly told family they were heading to the Yukon to find work. Schmegelsky’s father received a text message from his son, the last one he would ever get, saying they were headed to Alberta. Is there a clue in that contradiction? Perhaps.Maybe the plan all along was to kill. That conjures up images of things such as Columbine High School (before either McLeod or Schmegelsky was even born) and so many other more recent crimes, images of teenage boys with guns in their hands and murder on their minds. If that was the case, could there be other victims? Where would they have got the gun(s)? We still don’t know. There has been some snippets of information about the two young men, particularly Schmegelsky, showing signs of anti-social behaviour, but nothing obvious to suggest that level of violence. Early on, Kam’s father Keith McLeod called his son “a kind, considerate, caring young man.” Al Schmegelsky, Bryer’s father, called them “good boys.” Soon their faces would be splashed on media around the world and the “good boys” were now suspected murderers on the run.The last images of them most of us will see were caught on a store surveillance camera on July 21. They show the pair walking through a Co-op in northern Saskatchewan. Charged with second-degree murder in the death of 64-year-old Leonard Dyck, whose body was found 48 hou ...
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