It took years of amateur sleuth work, tracking down obscure records, checking directories and documents, cajoling and persuading police to investigate, but now a chapter in Scott Magri’s life has been closed.
It happened March 9 in Port Coquitlam provincial court, where the man who indecently assaulted him 37 years ago entered a guilty plea.
Gilles Joseph Paul Brophy, born March 16, 1952, entered the plea to one count of indecent assault on a male. Brophy, from St. Hyacinthe, Quebec, received a nine-month conditional sentence, to be served in the community, a year’s probation, had to provide a DNA sample and is on the national sex offender registry for 20 years.
“It’s taken a while to process, right?” said Magri, a Pitt Meadows resident.
“He had to give his DNA, so that’s a good thing. If we didn’t do all this work, that wouldn’t have happened.
“He never would have been on the offender’s list, so that would have never happened.”
Magri was only 10 years old when the incident happened in 1979 in a Pitt Meadows trailer court.
While Magri went on to live a tumultuous life, his mother Carol Magri didn’t know what happened until 2012, when Scott wrote about it in his book Lessons: Crimes, Games and Pain.
Since then, it’s been an ordeal for both as they started an investigation that would go in fits and starts with pieces slowly falling into place, all the while trying to get the police on side to follow the case.
He didn’t know the man’s name and only later learned that he went by the name of Joe, but that was enough to start the hunt.
“No prison record either, that’s why he was hard to find,” Scott explains.
After reading the book, Carol talked to her son.
“I did not want to push him,” she said.
But the search began, a quest that would take four years, until finally in December 2014, Scott identified the suspect from a series of photos that police showed him.
“As soon as he saw him, he knew,” said Carol.
She has kept meticulous records about the case, all neatly collated into a binder with photocopies of sentence orders, probation orders, police correspondence and news clippings.
“You think, as a mom, you can protect your child. These things happen and you can’t.”
She doesn’t forgive Brophy, she added. “He took Scott’s life away.”
Brophy is walking free, she says.
“He got nothing, really.”
Searching through her correspondence, she comes to a selection of photos of Scott from when he was a kid and holds it up.
“This is who he took away from me, my little guy,” Carol says.
She still wants to get a transcript of the case so she has a complete record.
During their quest, Scott and Carol kept feeding bits and pieces of information to the Ridge Meadows RCMP and wrote a letter to the commissioner of the RCMP, asking police to step up their work. Locally, Const. Kim Granneman did the legwork.
“She worked her butt off and she said this is a case she’ll never forget.”
Hats off to her, Scott added later.
Anything else that’s thrown on her desk will be a piece of cake, she told him.
With the case in court, Scott also had a chance to talk about what happened.
“I didn’t think it had that big a [effect] on me,” he said.
But after talking to victim services, it became apparent how his past affected his future life, such as his drug use to heal the pain.
His book details Scott’s “painful life of drugs, crime and physical brutality.”
Most of the book was written under the influence of oxycontin and describes a never-ending roller coaster of escapades, fights and hair-raising life experiences.
He decided to start writing the book after his third suicide attempt.
“This book was designed so that when you have a bad day, you can open the book to any page and find something that happened to me. It will remind you that you are not alone,” he says in the forward.
Some people have easy lives, some don’t.
It’s amazing how many other people are going through the same thing, he added.