For the Canadian Armed Forces 67 year old Sheila Fynes “became one of the most hated individuals in the country,” writes Ottawa Citizen journalist David Pugliese in an article published Thursday (March 12). “Fynes’s crime was that she wouldn’t shut up. She, and her husband Shaun, refused to stop speaking out about the suicide of their Afghan veteran son, Stuart Langridge.”
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, a Military Police Complaints Commission report on investigations into the suicide of Canadian Cpl. Stuart Langridge detailed a list of errors and failures by the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service. This included a decision to withhold a suicide note for fourteen months that he had addressed to his family outlining his wishes for a funeral.
In his article, Pugliese writes “a behind-the-scenes smear campaign” against the parents. “In more than 25 years covering the military, I’ve never seen such a vindictive attack.”
After describing the events that led to the Commission’s report and findings, Pugliese ends his article with:
In the end, the attempts to discredit the couple and stop them from finding out what happened to their son ultimately backfired. As Sheila Fynes demonstrated during a news conference Wednesday, she has become an eloquent advocate for trying to change how the military treats families and conducts police investigations.
She has no plans to go away.
“They took our son away from us,” she once explained to me. “There is nothing more they can do to hurt us.”
More information:
Ottawa Citizen/David Pugliese – The Canadian military’s war against a soldier’s family – here
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