Outside the Ottawa Courthouse last weekend, Lyle Young said the verdict sending his wife’s killer to prison for at least 25 years was the right decision — but also bittersweet.
“My wife is no longer here,” Young said of Elisabeth Salm, the 59-year-old woman who was sexually assaulted and brutally beaten on May 24, 2018, by Tyler Hikoalok, then 18. Salm died in hospital the following day.
Salm was volunteering as a librarian at the Christian Science Reading Room in downtown Ottawa when Hikoalok, now 22, walked in that morning. A jury found him guilty of first-degree murder on Sunday.
Another Indigenous man, though a dangerous offender, will be spending life in prison.– Lyle Young, Elisabeth Salm’s widower
“Further,” Young’s prepared statement went on, “another Indigenous man, though a dangerous offender, will be spending life in prison.”
Mundie Salm, one of the slain woman’s sisters, also spoke about the family’s mixed emotions following the jury’s decision.
While the verdict sent a clear message that violence against women will not be tolerated, “we also don’t like the fact that we’re sending another Indigenous person for further incarceration,” Salm said.
“This trial took place against the backdrop of continuing trauma, suicides and mental health issues in Inuit and other Indigenous societies,” she said. “We need to get better at truth and reconciliation.”
Mundie Salm said she and her siblings have “mixed emotions” after the verdict, which will send “another Indigenous person” to prison.
The family, drained after a legal odyssey that stretched more than four and a half years, left things there, noting that everything else they had wanted to say was contained in the remarks they’d made earlier in court.
Ottawa a ‘colder, bleaker place’
Those victim impact statements, delivered by Young, Mundie Salm and Elisabeth Salm’s three other siblings as Hikoalok at times quietly wept in his prisoner’s box, took an hour to deliver and ran the gamut of emotions.
The family talked about the shock of learning about the “barbaric” sexual attack and the “gut-wrenching moment” when Hikoalok’s age became known.
“The same as my eldest son,” Mundie Salm recalled.
They talked about the anxiety that accompanied each of the trial’s several delays, and about Salm’s personality as a socially conscious nature lover being lost amid the “sickening, clinical and impersonal descriptions” of her injuries.
They regretted how Ottawa, where the far-flung family typically held its reunions at Salm and Young’s home, felt like “a colder, bleaker place” following the attack.
Mundie Salm expressed frustration at what she saw as a lack of remorse from Hikoalok, who testified that he did not remember the attack due to an alcohol-induced blackout.
But in some moments, Salm’s family also voiced their awareness of the systemic challenges facing Indigenous offenders like Hikoalok.
“Our family had, with this act, suddenly become directly connected to the tragic fallout of Canada’s violent colonial history,” Mundie Salm said. “There was a lot more to this story and I desperately wanted to understand.”
Statements showed compassion, lawyer says
Hikoalok is an Inuk from Cambridge Bay, Nunavut, who came from an unstable home, suffered violence as a child and became known to police for sexual improprieties while he was still a youth, the trial heard.
The case revealed few other details about his background, though a psychiatrist testified that Hikoalok exhibits brain abnormalities that could be due to fetal alcohol spectrum disorder.
“He’s quiet, not much to say, a little bit reserved, but still trying to process what just happened,” said Hikoalok’s lawyer Michael Smith at the end of the trial.
Naomi Sayers, an Anishinaabe lawyer based in Sault Ste. Marie, Ont., said several of her clients struggle with similar mental health issues and require a trauma-informed and “really personalized” approach.
“Law school doesn’t prepare you for this,” she said.
Sayers said the Salm family’s statements had her at a loss for words given their “compassion” for Hikoalok.
She said she believes the statements are reflective of a growing awareness among non-Indigenous Canadians of the systemic barriers facing Indigenous people and the trauma wrought by systems like Canada’s residential schools.
“I think it shows empathy and I think it shows … they understand the difficulty being faced here,” Sayers said.
Naomi Sayers, an Indigenous lawyer and observer of the Tyler Hikoalok murder trial said the statements made by Elizabeth Salm’s family members show that they recognize the difficulties faced by Canada’s Indigenous population, which is disproportionally represented in the country’s criminal justice system.
Hoping for ‘remorse and reform’
Luc-Anne Salm, the victim’s other sister, handed out yellow carnations to courtroom attendees. During her victim impact statement, she held one of the flowers as she approached the prisoner’s box and looked Hikoalok in the face.
“They represented the qualities that Elisabeth expressed, like warmth and sunshine. A bright spirit,” she said later when asked about the significance of the flowers.
Elisabeth Salm’s husband Lyle Young was the last family member to give a statement. A longtime Christian Science practitioner, Young spoke for a half hour in the measured cadence of a priest.
Young looked back on his marriage to Salm since 1990, and at the “Kafkaesque” moment when he gave police permission to take evidence from her body and endured the surreal experience of being questioned himself.
“If I had been a police officer, I wouldn’t have yet excluded myself as a suspect,” he acknowledged.
Despite the “heinous crime,” Lyle refused to give in to bitterness and drew instead on his faith, he said.
“Why should I let someone else’s incapacity to control their impulses control me and take away my joy? Why should I let a poky criminal justice system take me hostage and rob me of my peace?”
Young then addressed Hikoalok directly, expressing hope that the 22-year-old might better himself during his long incarceration.
“Which of us can affect the other more?” Young asked. “You affecting me by killing my wife? Or my effect on you, through practising forgiveness, strongly coupled with an insistence on and support of self-awareness, remorse and reform?”
A missed opportunity
Sara Mainville, an Anishinaabe lawyer based in Toronto, said “prison is not a place of healing” and that, despite some progress made in tailoring corrections programs to Indigenous cultures, the pace of change remains too slow.
“I have a 17-year-old myself and I just wish that … real action was happening in a much quicker pace with a lot more investment in systemic reforms so that [Hikoalok] had a healing place to go to as opposed to a prison,” Mainville said.
Since Hikoalok’s first-degree murder verdict automatically triggered a life sentence without the possibility of parole for 25 years, no sentencing arguments were made. No Gladue report was issued in the case either.
The Gladue principle states that judges should consider an Indigenous offender’s history in sentencing, taking into account personal experience with residential schools, the foster care system, and physical or sexual abuse.
Mainville said the absence of a Gladue report in Hikoalok’s file is unfortunate.
“It’s important for society to know more about his story to understand what happened,” she said. “It’s sort of like a cautionary tale, so it doesn’t happen again.”