It would never be entirely clear what happened inside. Soon after, Kyro entered the bathroom as well. Neil left the bar to go home and get his brother to join the family.Īrt walked to the back of the bar, past a door concealing a narrow hallway, and into the bathroom. Cory was on the run from an assault charge in Kitchener.Īrt was celebrating coming off the night shift at Stelco. They dated two students who attended Mohawk College. They both had prior criminal convictions. In the cramped space four of them took turns shooting in their respective games.Ĭory, three months shy of his 20th birthday, and Kyro, 22, finished their game, sat at their table, drinking beer, and argued, loudly, needling each other. On that night 10 years ago, the pair played pool in O'Grady's at one table, Art and his 18-year-old son Neil played at the other. She calls them by their first names: Cory and Kyro, as though she knows them, which in the worst imaginable way, she does.Ĭory McLeod and Kyro Sparks lived in Kitchener and had never met the Rozendals. The two men who killed Art are about to live free. She has been through an awful storm, lasting years, but feels like she can now look forward.Īnd the future is good, except for one very bad thing she knew was coming, although that makes it no easier. The story turned into a Hamilton Spectator miniseries, a book, crime documentaries that still run on TV.īrenda sips a cup of tea in her apartment. It was unthinkable that anyone would want to hurt him.Īrt's nature, and the randomness of his violent death: that's why the funeral visitation line in the freezing cold stretched for blocks on Upper Wellington Street. That was why everyone was shocked when they heard he had been killed in a bar fight. He had a habit of hugging his buddies, and he always did it up big on Valentine's Day for Brenda, wrote her poems, his friends told him he was making them all look bad. He was a hard-hat-wearing fixer of heavy machinery at Stelco and a big-hearted father and romantic. That was Art: all it took was for Brenda to say she'd like to dance in the rain someday, and one night he carried a chunky stereo speaker to the front porch and pulled her out on the driveway. She lives in an apartment in the east end with a panoramic view of the east harbour, lower city and the Mountain, where she and Art raised their family on East 7th Street. She sold the family house five years after Art was killed. The next year she gave birth to Neil, three years after that, Jordan.Īt 31 she survived two brain aneurysms and, feeling blessed with new life, they renewed wedding vows.Īt 44, a few weeks before her birthday, she called family and friends in the middle of the night to tell them Art was gone. Who she was before was Brenda Merrill, 22 years old when she met Art, who was a year younger.Īt 25 she married him. Read the original Jon Wells 11-part series "Deadly encounter" here. ![]() "I'll never be who I was before," says Brenda Rozendal. It's time to visit the woman who no longer wears that ring, who that night had dropped to her knees and feverishly tried to breathe life into her husband. You leave, stride unconsciously quicker, and take a deep breath of cold air. Years ago you wrote about the Rozendal homicide, and that moment, grasping for beauty in the darkness, wondering if, in that space between life and death, Art's mind took him to good times: lovingly restoring a muscle car with his buddy Bill, a wrench in one hand and cold OV in the other to the day he stared into Brenda's hazel eyes, asked her to marry him and slid the ring on her finger, her nails shiny from a fresh coat of red polish. ![]() You walk to the back hallway by the bathroom and imagine the scene: screams, a cop winding his way around pool tables and through the O'Grady's crowd to this spot, where Art Rozendal lay, beaten, blood pooling in his eye sockets. Inside the pub music plays, there's a bartender but not another soul. A woman at a bus stop talks loudly to no one. It's frigid outside on a Tuesday night, just like it was back then. 14, 2005, because it was a five-minute walk from their home in the Bruce Park neighbourhood.Īrt's killers were here that night because they stayed with girlfriends who rented an apartment at 643 Upper James. at Brucedale Avenue.Īrt Rozendal, his wife Brenda, and their oldest son were here on Jan. HAMILTON - It's no longer called O'Grady's Roadhouse, a robust sounding name for what was a dingy pub at 592 Upper James St.
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