Some Kind of Hero: Love, Death and Trauma in a Nova Scotia Town

Synopsis: The story of an African-Nova Scotian soldier and the woman he wasn’t supposed to love, and how his return from Afghanistan led to a tragedy that raises difficult questions about moral responsibility, domestic violence and the overlooked costs of war.
 

What is the legacy of a fallen soldier who takes his family with him? This is the problem posed by the story of Lionel and Shanna Desmond. The young couple grew up in Guysborough County, Nova Scotia, one of the province's oldest Black communities. Raised in a broken home, Lionel sought stability in Shanna's home and the military. Instead, the trauma of war led to PTSD, and he returned from combat a deeply troubled man.

All of this was brought to bear in the reporting that followed the events of January 3, 2017, when Lionel's body was found in the home of his estranged wife. Shanna's body was there, too, as were those of their 10-year-old daughter, Aaliyah, and Lionel's mother, Brenda, alongside a rifle Lionel had purchased earlier that day. Lionel's family, friends and the veteran community stood up for him, claiming he was a hero who had succumbed to the tortures of PTSD. But an opposing view emerged: that he was a man possessed by anger towards his wife, who so feared for her life she called a domestic-violence hotline for advice on the day she was killed.

Was Lionel a hero or monster, or do these terms even begin to capture the moral and factual complexity of the Desmonds' sad fate? Having returned from his own deployment to Afghanistan struggling with PTSD and its impact on his own family, Kirk Johnson, a mixed-race son of Three Mile Plains, a place with much in common with the Desmonds' home, seeks truth and understanding in the wake of tragedy.