As a news outlet, Northern Life has a responsibility to document life in Greater Sudbury.
Some of you have questioned our decision to carry the sad and tragic story of Vincent Harper, a 55-year-old man whose lifeless body was discovered in a laneway downtown Aug. 29.
The man who came upon Harper has been documenting his own life in Sudbury on a YouTube channel. As he has done for years, Marcel St-Jean documented this tragedy — and has taken quite a bit of flak for his decision to post that particular five-minute clip.
Northern Life came across the video two days later. We didn't share it right away. We attempted first to reach the police, but received no response. We also attempted to reach St-Jean himself, but he didn't return our call.
Our decision to carry the video is simple and it has nothing to do with trying to get more hits on our website, NorthernLife.ca, as several readers on social media have suggested.
As I said, the decision was simple to me. A man died in our downtown core, in the early evening, not far off a busy street, during what is likely Sudbury's largest summer festival, but no one — save hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people on social media — was saying a thing about it.
Greater Sudbury Police didn't acknowledge Harper had died until five or six days later, and only after we covered the story. By that point though, the video already had nearly 300,000 views and was a prime topic of conversation on Facebook.
Everyone wanted to know: Was foul play involved? Who was this man? Why wasn't the media saying anything about it? Or the police? Was it being pushed under the rug because the man was homeless and because there was fear the death would — although it's not clear how exactly — impact RibFest?
No one knew, because Harper's death wasn't on anyone's radar — anyone with a loud enough mouthpiece, anyway. Thousands of you wanted to know what happened to this man, though, and that makes it news.
It's clear in the video that other people — likely headed to Ribfest as was St-Jean — were parked within view of the two men lying on the ground, but only the man with the camera thought to ask if they needed help.
I think we did what newspapers have always done: shine a light into dark spaces, to separate shadow from substance, to seek answers, to hold up a mirror on the community.
Sudbury, like countless other cities, has an invisible population, a segment of society often looked upon with scorn, pigeon-holed by labels like “bums,” “addicts” and “crazies.”
Labels are for products though, not people, and now a clearer picture of who Vincent Harper was has emerged. His family has a connection to Elijah Harper, the former Manitoba cabinet minister and a key opponent of the Meech Lake Accord. He has a son in Sudbury and family in Toronto.
Despite struggling with alcohol, he was described as a charming man, with a talent for making people smile.
He was loved and he will be mourned. That his family has to live with the knowledge of the video is an undeniably sad thing.
If we live in a just society, we should be more sensitive to the issue of homelessness. I'm not suggesting we all go out and volunteer at the soup kitchen (although that would be good) or become anti-poverty activists. Nor should we ignore the issue or treat the homeless as invisible.
And that, I fear, is what happened to Harper — in life, he had become one of the invisible. The sad reality is, in death, he was not.
Mark Gentili is the managing editor of Northern Life and NorthernLife.ca.
