Mounties spent years making case against Saskatchewan sexual predatorBy Barb Pacholik, Postmedia News November 6, 2010Read more:REGINA — The two men, one a veteran police officer, had been talking about family and work, when the conversation took on a more introspective tone. At that point, Sgt. Gary Cross asked: "When life is all over here and you're up there to face the maker, what do you want to have done — the one thing you want to have completed before you leave this world?"
From across the table, Ron Sawa replied: "I think I've done it . . . Just what I've been doing. Helping people."
Sawa had been working at the Paul Dojack Youth Centre, formerly the Saskatchewan Boys School, for 16 years.He joined the staff in 1973 as a parental care supervisor. Through the years, his responsibilities had grown to where he was overseeing dorms of teenage boys.
Now, in March 1989, Sawa had ended up in an interview room with Cross after Regina police stopped him outside his house. Sawa thought it was merely a traffic issue, some minor violation of the law.
It wasn't.
A teenage boy, who had recently been sent to the Dojack Centre after committing some break-ins, had seen Sawa there and recognized him. There was much the boy couldn't remember about the two encounters with Sawa at the man's house a couple of years earlier — but he remembered enough.
Sawa, on the other hand, initially told the police he couldn't recall the boy ever having been to his house.
The interview progresses and Cross asks Sawa once again: "So you don't recall him being at your house?"
"I shouldn't say 'recall,' " Sawa replies. "He may have been there. I don't know."
Cross then asks if Sawa remembers another, separate, incident nearly two decades earlier. "I see out there a report that indicates you've had a problem like this once before," Cross says. "Do you recall that?"
"Seventy-two," Sawa says, meaning the year, 1972. The other cop, he explains, the officer who had picked him up outside his house, had shown him the old police file.
The investigation in '72 hadn't gone anywhere — but now a boy had told police that, as a 14-year-old, he had gone twice to Sawa's house, where he blacked out after drinking large quantities of liquor, and come to without his clothes on.
In the interview room, Sawa is asked to rate his own level of honesty on a scale of zero to 100, "I'd say close to 100," he replies. "Maybe 90."
Did he, in fact, touch the teenage boy?
"I probably did," says Sawa. "I don't remember anything that he's saying."
Sawa acknowledges that he does remember the boy being at his house — but not in his bed or the shower with him as the youth is claiming.
Finally, Sawa admits that, yes, he "probably" did touch the boy. However, the contact was over the boy's clothes, he says, as they watched a show together on television.
Then asked if he'd had other boys at the house and done "this," Sawa twice denies it.
"You're sorry about this, are you?" Cross says.
"You bet," Sawa replies, and then, his voice trailing off, he adds: "Nothing since that . . ."
As he's leaving the interview room, Cross thanks Sawa for coming clean and wishes him luck. "I think this thing will work out fine for you in the end," Cross says, in feigned reassurance for a man the seasoned officer knows has just confessed.
Ronald Anthony Joseph Sawa, 39 years old at the time, was charged with sexually assaulting the teenage boy. Following a preliminary hearing, Sawa was committed to stand trial, but subsequently pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of common assault.
Sawa received an absolute discharge, but he did not escape unscathed. The charge prompted an internal investigation at the Dojack Centre. In 1989, the longtime employee lost his job.
Ron Sawa quietly walked away.—
Sixteen years later, in late 2005, a man we'll call "Bob" was at a Toronto detention centre when the captain called the prisoner over to a side room.
The captain held a fax in his hand, but before he could say anything, Bob spotted three words on the page: Saskatchewan Boys School.
"It was 30 years earlier, and I knew exactly what it was about," Bob would later tell a Regina courtroom
He was asked what had changed; why speak out now when he'd kept quiet for decades?
"What had changed? An RCMP officer who took the time to travel this country from east to west to look for all these people and put a lot of hard work into this case," he replied. "That's what changed my motivation . . . and my trust level, and telling him exactly what happened."
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Over nearly 2 1/2 years, RCMP Cpl. Len Boogaard talked with a lot of "Bobs" — because of a court order, the victims can't be identified by their true names. Most of those conversations took place in this country's prisons and jails, where many of the men had passed much of their lives.
"You'd go to a penitentiary and you'd see these individuals," Boogaard recalls. "It's something like you would see on TV. They're the big, hard-assed-type cons with the tattoos and the muscle shirts. They walk in and they give you that look — basically, 'What-the-f are you doing here' type of thing.
"All I had to do was mention a name — the Saskatchewan Boys School, or the name of the individual — and all of a sudden, they were just like little kids. Their demeanour just broke down, the sobbing, the crying."
That name was Ron Sawa.
"There were some individuals that right then and there wanted to get it off their chest," Boogaard says. Others, despite being victims, had been on the other side of the criminal system for years — indeed still were — and they were loathe to break the cons' code of silence. "They were afraid of being labelled a rat," he adds.
Given time, some of those men also came forward with statements. Some never did, preferring to keep the past in the past. "They indicated they had gotten over it," says Boogaard. "I don't think they have, or else they wouldn't be sitting where they were."
In the early 2000s, about a half-dozen lawsuits began trickling into the Regina-based Merchant Law Group from men who claimed they were the victims of sexual and physical abuse while housed at the Saskatchewan Boys School/Paul Dojack Centre. After years of keeping quiet, they decided to call the firm that had become well known for its work on claims of abuse in Indian residential schools.
The Saskatchewan Boys School opened as a residential facility in 1950 to provide care for "delinquent" boys or those who lacked a parent or guardian who could safely care for them. In 1975, "school" was replaced by "centre," when the facility became a residential treatment program for boys aged 12 to 15 as well as a 10-bed remand unit for those before the courts. It was renamed the Paul Dojack Youth Centre in 1985, and became a closed-custody facility — a youth equivalent to jail — for boys and girls aged 12 to 17.
Throughout, it has been government-operated.
The men sued not only Sawa, but the much deeper pockets of the Saskatchewan government.
Lawyer Tony Merchant doubts the law ever would have caught up to Sawa if not for those early lawsuits.
"Because, what had happened with these people — I spoke with a fellow who came forward for the first time. He said, 'I never told my wife. I never told anybody. You're the only person with whom I've ever spoken about this,'" says Merchant. "So, you had people who were embarrassed about what happened. That's common if people have been sexually abused. But they were also, in almost every instance, embarrassed about the fact that they'd had some criminal problem when they were a young man. So they wanted to put both of those things behind them."
A combination of the civil lawsuits landing in government offices and some of the plaintiffs making criminal complaints prompted an RCMP investigation in 2004.
After undergoing back surgery in the fall of that year, Boogaard was sidelined from uniformed, street policing. He became a plainclothes officer in the general investigation section (GIS), where the Sawa investigation was underway. GIS was swamped. Boogaard was assigned the Sawa file and plugged away at it full time from May 2005 to July 2007.
There was a lot of ground to cover, with some 1,300 teens having gone through the centre in the years Sawa worked there. Boogaard crossed this country and also dipped into the U.S. in his search for them and former staff.
The goal was to try to find everyone who had been in Sawa's care or had contact with him, including those on hockey and football teams he coached, sometimes recruiting boys from the centre.
In many of the cases, the centre's troubled boys had grown to become lawless men. About 500 of some 700 people Boogaard interviewed were inmates.
Boogaard had worked in policing — as a Mountie and with the Toronto police — for 25 years when he was handed the Sawa file. He was skeptical at first.
"I spent all these years going out and arresting and charging and then trying to convince the prosecutor . . . these are the dregs of society and this is what they've done," he says. Boogaard admits he had "a big attitude change."
As he talked to more people, a consistent pattern of behaviour by Sawa emerged. Often, the stories were corroborated not only by other inmates, but former staff from the facility."It spanned from one end of the country to the other. There was no way that everybody could get together and all of a sudden say, 'Hey, let's get together and let's do this lawsuit against Ron Sawa and the provincial government.' There was just too much."
Although a victim of a crime, Bob arrived at court in leg shackles and handcuffs. Many of the people Sawa preyed on did not straighten their lives out at Dojack — they never did.
The what-ifs weren't lost on Boogaard, a father of three sons and a daughter. Among Sawa's victims are robbers, killers, sex offenders and career criminals.
"You think, 'OK, so if this didn't happen to you while you were in that school, by this individual, where would you be now?'" the Mountie says from his Ottawa office, where he was transferred from Regina last year. "And they brought it up themselves, too, a lot of them. There were fellows that were querying their own sexual orientation, along those lines, as well. Depression, alcohol, drugs, et cetera. They try to cope with it."
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In August 2008, the RCMP held a news conference to announce that Sawa had been charged with 39 offences — including indecent assault, gross indecency, sexual assault, and sexually touching a child while in a position of trust or authority, occurring between 1974 and 1989. He was accused of molesting 18 male youths, ages 10 to 17, most of whom had been residents of the Saskatchewan Boys School/Dojack Centre. Two more charges, involving one more youth, followed.
Sawa remained free until April this year when he was sentenced after pleading guilty to nine charges involving nine victims. An agreement reached by the Crown and defence amalgamated some of the charges and dropped others.
Asked by Justice Ian McLellan if he had anything to say before sentence was imposed, Sawa tersely replied, "No. I do not."
All but one of the nine victims, who was in foster care at the time, were molested — offences that ranged from touching to oral and anal sex — at the Boys School or Dojack. In the words of prosecutor Roger DeCorby, Sawa "exploited their vulnerability."
Sawa had slowly groomed his victims, then used his power at the institution to ensure they complied and kept quiet about the abuse.
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Ron Sawa sat in the same prisoner's dock where many of his victims had sat over the years. Indeed, some of them had been sent to prison by the same judge. On this day, however, none of them was in court — to give victim impact statements, to look Sawa in the eye, or to see him taken away in handcuffs.
Bob was the only one to file a victim impact statement. The handwritten statement wasn't read aloud in court, so it's unclear if Sawa ever heard it.
Profound in its brevity, it reads:
"You breached the trust, you instilled horror, you took away peace, security, self esteem. I feel sick to my stomach as I write about this. Your actions have affected my relationships throughout life. I couldn't open up with people because I felt ashamed over what you put me through, and thought it would make me less in the eyes of my loved ones. I even thought, perversely, that in some way what you did to me I deserved. You substantially contributed a lot of twisted values beliefs, fears, horror and negativity to my young impressionable mind."
Like the note Bob received five years earlier giving him an opportunity to tell what he knew about Sawa, the victim-impact statement arrived by fax. It was sent to Regina from a prison in Ontario.
Bob is a designated dangerous offender, serving an indeterminate sentence (as are at least two other men who have filed suit against Sawa) that will keep him behind bars for decades.
Sawa was sentenced to 4 1/2 years in prison. The 61-year-old will be eligible to seek full parole in October 2011.
The civil suits suggest the victims number nearly 10 times those reflected in his guilty pleas.
As of last month, the province had settled with 11 claimants from the Boys School/Dojack Centre, with compensation ranging from $25,000 to $35,000, although those don't reflect the most serious allegations involving rapes.
When he testified against Sawa, Bob was asked about his lawsuit.
"There's no money that can be given to restore stuff like that," he said. "I don't really give a crap about the money part of it, because I've wasted 33 years of my life in the penitentiary."
