Starlight Tour: The Last, Lonely Night of Neil Stonechild

By Robert Renaud and Susanne Reber

Book Overview

A teen’s suspicious death, a shocking police cover-up and a mother’s search for the truth.In 1990, on a November night that hit –28 degrees Celsius, seventeen-year-old Neil Stonechild disappeared only... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0735277508
• ISBN13: 9780735277502
• Release Date: January 2019
• Publisher: Random House Canada
• Length: 448 Pages
• Weight: 1.23 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Sad and Riveting

Like a tragedy from the hand of Shakespeare, this story is on a scale so vast it is hard to get ones mind around. Saskatoon, a prairie city of two hundred thousand with hot summers and winter cold that will let you know who is boss, is the setting for this true story. The state of race relations in this place is directly reflective of Canada's troubled past with it's treatment of First Nations peoples. For years there had been rumors that some members of the police were taking native people (in one case a pregnant woman) out past the edge of town to walk back, sober up, settle down, rather than booking them and taking them to jail. Fear of the police kept most complaints from ever being brought to official light. Such "drop offs" in the winter though would begin taking a death toll. One man survived to lodge a complaint in the public domain after an encounter with one of the better officers of the police service who told him he was willing to listen to him. This lead, eventually, to the dramatic reopening of the case of a seventeen year old boy found frozen to death in a field in the industrial zone. Between 2000 and 2004 it is fair to say much of official Saskatoon was shaken to it's foundations behind closed doors and a tremendous drama played out in the legal arena in the investigation of this incident. The pursuit of truth and accountability by the boys mother is a study in true grit and the highest humanity. This book, written by reporters who attended most of the inquiry and had access to people that is reflected no where else, is a must read for anyone from police to social workers to those interested in the relationship between police and communities. A fine documentary film by a grad student at University of Saskatchewan was another thing that came from this matter but this book is humbling in it's dealings with the level of how cruel human beings can be to other human beings. A lesson here for many of us and should be a "must read". The events detailed in this book continue to cast a long shadow in Saskatoon.