By Peter Wolf | North of Polite
Commentary

The call came in at about 3:22 in the morning on August 6. The caller said he’d been kidnapped and was hurt. Police believe the voice on that broken-up line was Fiasal Hussein’s. Later that morning, searchers found his body near Calling Lake, Alberta. He was twelve years old.

By late October, there were three arrests and a court date. Cole Morin and Curtis Brown each face charges of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Rachel Stuart faces a charge of second-degree murder. The RCMP listed November 9 for their next appearance in Athabasca. All three are presumed innocent, and the charges have yet to be proven in court.

A court date gives a newspaper somewhere to pick up the story. It also changes the language. From here on, much of what we read will be about appearances, evidence and rulings. Each of those things matters. So does getting them right when the story moves slowly and there’s pressure to make every appearance sound like a breakthrough.

Some people online are calling Fiasal Hussein a gangster. Others say he wanted to be one. Police said he knew the accused and had been around people with criminal ties. They also allege he was lured from home. How did knowing somebody turn into knowing what was in a twelve-year-old boy’s head? The public record gives us no basis for that leap. And if a child is spending time around adults involved in crime, the question worth asking is what danger he was in and who, if anyone, knew about it. His right to be safe never depended on whether he kept good company.

What can investigators establish about the hours before that call? When did anyone first know Fiasal was in danger? Was there a chance to reach him sooner? It would be easy to point to a family, a school or an agency and demand to know why somebody didn’t act. First we’d need to know what they knew and when they knew it.

We know so little about Fiasal’s life from the public account. Most of what has been printed about him concerns the last hours of it. There will be more to write as the case moves through court, and we’ll follow it. For now, one of the few things police have told us about that morning is that they believe a boy who was hurt got through to 911 and asked for help. His name was Fiasal Hussein.

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