Nunavut man gets 15-year sentence for 2010 shooting spree

From the second floor of a house overlooking Cape Dorset, Elee Geetah, then 19, shot down at the community for hours on Oct. 10, 2010, before giving himself up to police.

A 23-year-old Cape Dorset man, in custody since 2010, will remain in jail for nearly nine more years, following earlier convictions for manslaughter and four firearms charges.

Nunavut justice Neil Sharkey said In a March 20 document explaining his judgment that “increasing firearm crime” was among the many reasons that he recently sentenced Elee Geetah to 15 years, minus credit for six years, three months for time already served in hard remand, in a Cape Dorset courtroom.

The manslaughter and firearms charges date to a day of terror that occurred Oct.10, 2010 in Cape Dorset.

That’s when Geetah killed his brother, Jamesie Simigak, 23, and fired numerous rounds with various rifles from a second-floor window at various targets in Cape Dorset.

For hours, Geetah terrorized many residents, hit a house belonging to an RCMP officer and killed two animals before giving himself up to police, Sharkey’s judgment said.

“Elee Geetah’s moral blameworthiness is high,” Sharkey said in the 31-page judgment.

The events of Oct. 10, 2010 were part of a long string of homicides, suicide attempts and shooting sprees that rocked Cape Dorset throughout the summer and fall of 2010 and produced national headlines.

“It is a sad observation that firearms, once used only as tool in the not too distant past, are now the first resort of choice as a weapon for a small but significant minority of frustrated and dysfunctional young men — young men unable to deal with jealousy, anger, or suicidal thoughts, and often driven by alcohol,” Sharkey said.

“The end result, when these young men reach for a rifle, is the all too common stand-off with police. In the past such a scenario might be expected to occur a few times within a year. Today it is not remarkable to hear of a police stand-off with much more alarming frequency.”

At his trial in July 2014, Geetah testified that the reason he fired all these shots was to create a dangerous situation in the hope that the RCMP would feel the need to kill him.

But Sharkey said he rejected the defence argument that Geetah’s plan was to seek “suicide by police.”

Sharkey delivered the sentence Jan, 29 in front of an empty courtroom in Cape Dorset: this spoke miles to him.

He said that in southern Canada he might have expected a large community turn-out for the sentencing hearing, “replete with much expression of public outrage at the offender for frightening the entire community.”

But in Cape Dorset, he was met with “an entirely empty courtroom.”

Except for Geetah’s parents, there was not “even a single community member present in support of Elee.”

That, Sharkey said, was “a sign of the community’s condemnation through silence.”

“The court must assure the good citizens of Cape Dorset that it affirms the value of a peaceful community, and that it denounces Elee’s conduct in the strongest possible terms,” Sharkey said in explaining the 15-year jail sentence he imposed on Geetah.

Geetah killed his brother with a single blast from a 20-gauge pump action shotgun from 10 to 14 feet away.

“It hit Jamesie on the top right side of his head, and death was instantaneous,” the court judgment notes.

“Everybody was sober. There was no alcohol or other intoxicants involved,” Sharkey said.

But in the hour or so before the shooting, Geetah had been having a bad day.

“He was not getting along with people and he had done some minor damage to the house. He got angry and loaded up the rifle,” says the judgment.

After shooting his brother, Geetah went to a second-floor window where he took a high-powered rifle and started spraying bullets into the community.

“The word was out within the community that there was a shooter on the loose; indeed, in such a small community, people could hear the shots,” the judgment said.

“But beyond that they really didn’t know who the shooter was or where he was. People phoned and used social media to find out what was going on and some families even loaded their own firearms in preparation for the worst.”

Among those affected: A.E., a young woman who was walking to a friend’s place, with a baby in her amauti, when gunfire erupted and shots started landing in front of and behind her. “A.E. was fearful the baby had been shot, but even in her panicked state, and as shots continued to rain down near her, she was able to take the baby from the amauti and run to a nearby house for safety.”

Geetah also shot at the house of an RCMP constable — the bullet passed through an exterior wall, through the kitchen, and into the opposite exterior wall. “Luckily, no one was in the kitchen,” Sharkey noted.

Prior to Oct. 10, 2010, Geetah, who had a history of sniffing glue as a youth, had no record of a previous conviction.

While Geetah may have been suicidal, Sharkey concluded “he was also possessed of sober and capable mind.”

And his “actions, on the afternoon of October 10, 2010, impulsive as they may have been, do not mitigate the horrific crime which he committed,” Sharkey said.

A manslaughter is usually an unlawful killing where there is no intent to kill. When a firearm is used in a killing, the mandatory minimum sentence for manslaughter is four years in prison and the maximum sentence is life.

In his reasons for judgment Sharkey said there could be only a limited application of Gladue principles in Geetah’s case.

These principles, which flow from a 1999 decision of the Supreme Court of Canada, are to be used in sentencing Aboriginal offenders and take into account Aboriginal peoples’ historic and social hardships, such as the effects of poverty, suicide, residential school and dispossession, and allow place for restorative justice.

But Sharkey said that “a restorative sentence will rarely, if at all, be in the cards in cases of particularly violent and serious crime.”

“I believe the properly warranted sentence for the manslaughter offence should reflect the prevalence of gun violence in our communities, and sadly, as well, how that violence has manifested itself in domestic or family settings.”

Geetah received a net sentence of eight years and nine months.

Sharkey arrived at the number by starting with a total sentence of 15 years: 10 years for Geetah’s manslaughter conviction plus a five-year consecutive, or added-on, sentence for the worst of the firearms charges — firing rounds into the house of Const. Robert Driscoll of the RCMP.

He then took into account the four years and three months of hard remand time during which Geetah awaited trial.

For that, Sharkey, with the agreement of Crown and defence lawyers, gave him credit for time served on a one to 1.5 ratio for each of the four full years served in remand, plus three months of “non-enhanced” credit.

That produced a total credit of six years and three months — leading to the net sentence of eight years and nine months.

Sharkey did decide to “minimally temper justice with mercy” by allowing Geetah to use a firearm after he has served his sentence.

“I do not think it necessary to punish the man that Elee Geetah is one day likely to be, for the rest of his life, for the criminal sin and tragic mistake he made in late boyhood. Accordingly, I will allow Elee Geetah, in the future as a man approaching middle age, to once again use a firearm as a tool, and to participate fully in the traditional life that he shared with his family prior to that tragic day of October 10, 2010.”

You can read the judgment here:

2015 NUCJ 10 RvGeetah