March 2000

After nearly two years in jail, Reggie was released from Sleepy Hollow Provincial Correctional Centre in March 2000.

For the first time in years, he had to figure out what came next. Reggie later described this period in his own words:

“After 2 years in jail, a year in rehab and my wife leaving me, I decided to try going straight. But it wasn’t working out very well. Still isn’t actually, now that I think about it.”

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After his release, Reggie was living with our parents in Souris.

He found a job that paid $7 an hour. We don’t yet know where he was working or how long he remained there.

He also tried to return to the field in which he had trained years earlier. Reggie had graduated with honours from the Avionics program at New Brunswick Community College, and after leaving jail he looked for avionics work at Slemon Park in Summerside. He was unsuccessful.

His marriage was also over, and he was trying to adjust to a very different life from the one he had known before jail.

Trying to Go Straight

Reggie’s own account makes clear that he was frustrated with how little money he was earning.

Eventually, someone he had met while incarcerated contacted him with another opportunity. Reggie wrote:

“So anyway, I was living with my parents and working for $7.00/hr., when I got a call from one of my old jail buddies, offering to set me up in the cocaine business. I was interested. I wasn’t making any money as it was, and I missed the excitement of the drug trade.”

Reggie doesn’t tell us exactly when that happened. It is one of the gaps in the record between his release from jail in March 2000 and the events we know much more about in 2001. What his account does tell us is that his attempt to go straight did not last.

The consequences of that decision would become apparent the following year.