A ghastly tableau of victims who must not be forgotten

Four years ago today, four were found. Zainab, 19, Sahar, 17, Geeti, 13, and Rona, 50, together inside a small black car. Together in death. It was a ghastly scene. The car sat on its wheels on the bottom of a shallow canal at Kingston Mills, a tiny crossroads in eastern Ontario. The four had been murdered – the car shoved into the canal in a bid to conceal the deed – killed because they dared to pursue freedom, friends, affection and love. Killed by – in the case of the three sisters, their father, mother and brother – in the case of Rona, by her husband and co-wife and son. During the murder trial of Mohammad Shafia, his wife Tooba and son Hamed, prosecutors played in court and released publicly the complete 14-minute video taken by a police diver on June 30, 2009. It appears here online for the first time (after the jump), a grim but necessary reminder of the terrible fate of four who died for honour and who should not be forgotten.

In Without Honour, my book about the Shafia case, there appears a detailed re-creation of the work of Constable Glenn Newell, the police diver who recovered from the bottom of the Rideau Canal the bodies of Zainab, Sahar, Geeti and Rona. Before he removed the bodies from the car, submerged in about eight feet of water, he documented the scene with a video camera. The video above does not include any audio and it is frequently plagued by digital snow (pixellation) that Newell was unable to explain when he testified in court. Here is an excerpt from Without Honour that describes Newell’s inspection of the car and the removal of the bodies:

Constable Glenn Newell planned two dives to the submerged car. During the first, he would carry a video camera to document the scene. He would remove the bodies during the second dive. Newell went into the water for the first time shortly after five. He did not have far to swim.

As he stood on the bottom, only a metre of water separated the top of his head from the surface. Rays of sunlight cut through the turbidity, past the floating bits of dirt, rotting leaves and weeds, and struck the smooth metal and glass of the submerged vehicle beside him, a machine in an alien landscape. The beams of light danced on the shiny surfaces.

Newell considered the visibility good because he could see more than a metre ahead. It was not cold or dark or dangerous in the shallow canal, unlike most of the hundreds of dives he had completed in twenty-four years of searching for bodies in lakes and rivers across Ontario. In many cases, he groped through weeds or along a silty bottom beyond the light’s reach. Often, he could not see anything; he would inch through black water until he could feel a submerged apparatus or until he pressed up against the unmistakable softness of a body. He had brought more than 250 people back to the surface, but never so many at one time.

Never four bodies.

Here, Newell did not have to search or grope or anticipate in darkness an awful discovery. He could see it plainly, though he could not understand it. It was very strange, he thought. The bodies, suspended like specimens inside the car, seemed to be piled on top of each other.

The car was almost in Colonel By Lake. At Kingston Mills, the lake was connected to the Cataraqui River by four large stone lock chambers, each as wide as a tractor trailer and as long as three rigs. Boats entered the locks through thirty-centimetre-thick oak gates that swung open like saloon doors. The car had come to rest on the bottom just outside the northernmost lock, with its right rear bumper nudged up against the lock gates. The vehicle’s nose was close to the stone wall of the canal. It appeared to have plunged backwards off the wall, which was two metres above the water’s surface.

Dressed in his neoprene suit, fins, gloves and a full face mask equipped with headphones and a microphone, Newell was tethered to the surface by a cable as thick as his thumb. The camera he carried had no viewfinder. The surface crew told him where to point the lens as a recorder captured the footage. His camera lingered first over the car’s front end, peering down at the silver badge: “Nissan.” On the edge of the hood above the badge, there was a softball-sized dent and a scrape. Newell moved around the driver’s side and discovered a large scrape as long as his forearm on the top of the left front fender. He documented more gashes along the rocker panel beneath the driver’s door. When he peered beneath the car, he could see why the vehicle was tilted, nose down. The rear wheels were suspended off the bottom because the right corner of the rear bumper was snagged on a protrusion on the wooden lock gate. The front wheels were turned to the left.

When Newell moved to the rear of the car, he saw that the driver’s side tail light was smashed and missing pieces of its red and clear plastic housing. The bumper and fender beneath it were significantly dented and scraped. The silver S and E from the “Sentra” nameplate were missing. Newell moved around to the passenger side. The tires were fully inflated and this side of the car was mostly devoid of gashes and dents. He made his way to the front and swam up and over the hood until the camera could peer down through the windshield into the passenger compartment. The glass was undamaged.

Newell had been underwater for ten minutes at this point. For the first time, the half-dozen police officers huddled around the video monitor on the surface saw what the car contained. Through the front windshield, beyond the steering wheel, slender legs in tight-fitting pants came into view. The feet, missing socks or shoes, were starkly white in the drab underwater environment, where everything seemed drained of colour.

When Newell moved around to the driver’s side, he could see a thick mat of dark hair next to the pillar between the front and rear side windows. The manual crank driver’s window was completely rolled down, so he had an unobstructed view of the head of a young woman. It was tilted to the left. Knots of hair wafted lazily around her, obscuring her face. Her body was strangely positioned. She seemed to be hugging the driver’s seat from behind so that her torso was in the rear passenger compartment, but her legs extended between the front bucket seats into the centre console. Her right hand was wrapped around the driver’s headrest while her left arm dangled toward the rear footwell. Geeti was not trapped or entangled in any part of the car.

Newell could see that the slender legs and shoeless feet he had seen through the windshield belonged to another young woman who was facing the rear of the car. She was floating with her arched back up against the roof so that her head, arms and upper body were draped over the front passenger seat, dangling into the back seat. Long dark hair swirled around her face. Her toes rested on the front edge of the driver’s seat. It was as if Zainab had been slung over the seat, face down.

No one was sitting in the front driver or passenger seats. Newell was surprised. In 90 percent of the underwater recoveries he performed on vehicles, he found a body in or near the driver’s seat. Often, panicked drivers became entangled in the steering wheel or seat belt of a sinking car and were found dead in or near the spot they’d been when they were piloting the vehicle. Newell could not tell who, if anyone, had been driving this car when it went into the water.

The officer reached into the car with the video camera, through the open driver’s window, to document the controls. The shift lever on the floor mounted console was in first gear and the keys were in the ignition. The two front seat belts were unfastened. A cellphone lay on the driver’s seat.

Newell moved on to the rear of the car, where the driver’s-side rear window was rolled down an inch. A screen of objects—a large black and white purse, a blanket and a plastic bag—were pressed up against the glass, mostly obscuring the view into the back seat. In the lower right corner of the window, a smooth, bare back was visible near the glass. The person was wearing black pants and a black crop top. Pink underwear peeked from the waistband. Sahar’s upper torso and head were turned toward the centre of the car and were concealed by the blanket. To the left of her torso, a clenched hand with manicured nails protruded through the debris, beneath the plastic bag. Rona’s hand rested on the front edge of the rear seat.

Newell swam up and hovered over the rear window. A blue teddy bear, wedged under the glass, grinned up at him. Near the bear, a pair of heads were butted together, face down. Only a tangle of hair was visible. He swam over the vehicle to the passenger side and found a splash of colour, a fuchsia top with thick straps, clinging to the torso of the barefoot girl he had first seen through the windshield. A mound of hair that had fallen around her head as she drooped over the passenger seat back concealed Zainab’s face.

Newell had now seen all of it, every corner of the gouged and scraped vehicle that contained four contorted bodies and a few bits of debris. He was more perplexed. The water was shallow, the damage to the car was superficial and there were no signs that any of the victims had become ensnared, if they had struggled to escape the sinking car. The open driver’s window was large enough that a person could easily pass through. Newell could have swum through the opening, even with the air tank on his back, though the procedures he followed forbade it. He saw no evidence that anyone had tried to get out through the window, although he believed it would have been an easy path to freedom.

The position of the bodies was puzzling. In small sinking vehicles, frantic occupants seeking to flee would bump into each other, Newell knew from experience. Often, they would end up falling back into the spots they sought to escape. Two of the victims in the Nissan Sentra were awkwardly draped around and over the seats. There were no signs that the other two had struggled to flee.

His reconnaissance complete, Newell swam to the surface.

He told the Kingston officers that there were four female bodies in the car and he saw no obvious signs of trauma, although his view of three of the victims was obscured. Newell said it didn’t look as if any of the victims had made any effort to escape the car.

“Have you ever seen four people drowned in a vehicle?” Chris Scott shouted from shore.

“I’ve never come across that,” Newell answered.

It would be a fairly simple process to remove the victims, one at a time. Newell would swim the bodies to shore and pass them up. First, Newell opened the left rear door of the Sentra and reached in to grab Sahar. Unrestrained by a seat belt, she was easiest to reach and to remove. He slid her out of the vehicle and swam her to the surface. He passed the girl to officers and repeated the process three times. Rona. Geeti. Zainab. Scott helped lift the limp bodies out of the cool water. The sodden girls and Rona, all fully dressed, were gently placed into white body bags on the flat expanse of grass next to the water. The bags were left open so that Julia Moore could photograph them. They were beautiful and unblemished, but it was a ghastly, sad sight, Scott thought.

The victims

from left, Zainab, Sahar, Geeti, Rona Amir