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“I’ll get it,” Lloyd said, rising slowly from the couch. He was 58, with arthritis and diabetes. Through the window, he saw uniformed police on his porch, more on the lawn. The ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ Police Bail Compliance unit would do spot checks to see if Chris was home, but he thought it was kind of late for them to show up. Lloyd opened the front door.Ìý

“What’s your name, sir?” one officer asked.Ìý

“Lloyd. Lloyd Sheriffe,” he replied.

The officer lunged forward. He grabbed Lloyd and dragged him out, then threw him on the front lawn. Knee against his back.

Marjorie raced to the door.Ìý“What’s going on?” she yelled, waving her arms. “He’s an old, sick man. He’s a diabetic.”

Chris ran up from the basement. “One (officer) was stomping on his back. One was kicking him. One had a knee on him.”

Marjorie and Chris stood in the doorway. Chris’s bail conditions required him to stay inside the family home in Etobicoke, unless he had to go to a medical appointment or a court hearing. One of the officers yelled to Chris.

“Hey, come out here.”

Marjorie told Chris to stay inside. The officer on the lawn kept talking. “Hey,” he said to Chris. “Your brother just hit a little boy and drove off.”

“What are you talking about?” Chris replied. “Also, I’m not coming outside. I’m on house arrest.”

They watched as Lloyd was handcuffed, searched and put in the back of a police cruiser and driven off. Just then, Lloyd Jr. (Chris’s brother) walked up the street and inside the front door. Lloyd Jr.‘s behaviour was increasingly erratic, and he had recently been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

A lightbulb went off for Marjorie and Chris. The police must have been looking for 25-year-old Lloyd Jr. — not 58-year-old Lloyd Sr.Ìý

Marjorie got in her car and headed to the police station. She was told her husband had been charged with assaulting police, assault and resisting arrest. Later, police charged Lloyd Jr. with dangerous driving.

It turns out police had been lying about Lloyd Jr. hitting a “little boy.” In fact, he hadn’t hit anyone. Lloyd Jr. had been driving home when he was pulled over for making what police described as “an unsafe turn.” They checked his insurance and told him it was invalid. (It wasn’t.) Police told him they were going to impound his vehicle and Lloyd Jr. drove off, smashing into a parked car. Not wanting to face a trial, Lloyd Jr. eventually pleaded guilty to dangerous driving.

But Lloyd Sr. wanted one.Ìý

“We said no, we are going to trial,” Marjorie recalled. “Because I was a witness ... and I will never forget it until the day I die.”

Ignoring a prosecutor’s overtures to plead guilty to a lesser charge, Lloyd Sr. secured a trial date. During one court appearance, Marjorie saw some of the officers who arrested her husband chatting in the hallway, glancing over from time to time.

“One of them looked at the other and said ‘two down, one more left to go,’ ” said Marjorie. With her two sons in legal hot water, Marjorie said the officers were likely thinking they had Chris and Lloyd Jr. on serious charges, and only “the dad left to go.”

At Lloyd Sr.‘s trial, only two of the five officers at the house that night testified.Ìý

Their story was that in their pursuit of Lloyd Jr. they politely knocked on the Sheriffes’ door, and that Lloyd Sr. was immediately “irate and belligerent,â€� and then out of the blueÌýhe punched the police. The judge was skeptical.

Then Marjorie and Lloyd testified. After a three-day hearing, the judge tossed out all charges. In his ruling, the judge said he found serious issues with police credibility. The family filed a civil suit. ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ police settled, giving Lloyd a payout. Under the terms of the settlement, Lloyd Sr. is not allowed to talk about the case, or how much money he got. If he did, police could sue to get their money back.

ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ police would not comment on the case. The Star provided detailed questions to police about the Lloyd Sr. case and also the Chris Sheriffe case. Spokesperson Stephanie Sayer said: “While we appreciate your interest in revisiting these cases, both the criminal proceedings and the separate civil matter were resolved through the courts over a decade ago. As such, we have no plans to re-examine either of these matters.”

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Like many Black families, the Sheriffes say they have an uneasy relationship with law enforcement. Marjorie says she always sent the children out the door with a reminder that, if police stopped them, they should be polite and keep their hands in sight.Ìý

Over the years, Chris and his brothers (Marjorie and Lloyd are a blended family, with four boys and one girl) were often stopped and carded by police, their informationÌýput into a database. (The practice was eventually stopped following a groundbreaking ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ Star series.) Chris was carded nine times as a youthÌý— when he was with friends, sometimes in his soccer uniform coming home from practice.ÌýAquilla, their sister, said it never happened to her, but it has to her brothers and male Black friends.Ìý

“One time, one of my brothers was riding my bike and he got pulled down by the police, off of the bike and arrested in cuffs. And then after it was determined that wasn’t a stolen bike,Ìýthey let him go with oh, sorry,” Aquilla says.Ìý

TheÌýoutcomes in Lloyd Sr.‘s criminal and civil case was welcome news for the Sheriffe family. ButÌýthere was bad news coming in Chris’s murder case.

Chris’s lawyer, Christopher Hicks, was already worried that opposing counsel would attack his client’s character, asking him about decisions he had made while on bail: fathering two children and smoking marijuana at home with his friends. His bail conditions didn’t prevent him from having friends visit, but at the time possession of pot was illegal.

In a prison interview, Chris says he has no regrets. Being confined to home for two years was boring. The friends who visited were kids he grew up with. As to the girlfriends and the two children?

“Those are my blessings. Like, I don’t look at them as regrets, I look at them as blessings.”

Something potentially more damaging happened just before the murder trial began.Ìý

ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½ police showed up at the Sheriffe family door and arrested Chris for aggravated assault fromÌýa bizarre incident that had occurred one year before the Golaub shooting. In a case of truth being stranger than fiction, Chris was accused of stabbing someone who attacked him with a samurai sword.Ìý

Chris was 17. He and some friends were over at another guy’s apartment. (That person was also 17, a minor, and will be called William to protect his identity in this story.) William’s story was that he wanted Chris and his friends to leave.

William “leaves and thinks it’s a good idea to get a samurai sword from his mom’s place,” says Misha Feldmann, the lawyer who represented Chris in the eventual trial of the sword case.

According to trial testimony, William comes back with the sword, and takes a swipe at Chris. To defend himself, Chris picks up a small knife on the floor of William’s place and stabs William in the stomach. Then Chris and his friends leave. The injury to William is severe. Paramedics rush him to hospital; he makes a full recovery.Ìý

The trial in this aggravated assault case will not take place until one year after the Golaub murder trial. Chris will be acquitted in the sword caseÌý— it was self-defence. In an interview, Chris tells the Star he didn’t realize how seriously William was injured. He never told anyone about the incident until the police, following a lead, arrested him. He recognizes it was a mistake not to have come forward.

It would have an impact on the murder trial. The fact that Chris was facing a charge of aggravated assault was raised by opposing lawyers. Also, a police mistake involving DNA from a glove found at the scene of the stabbing would be used at the murder trial to paint Chris as a liar. (That DNA mistake would not be discovered until long after Chris was serving his life sentence.)Ìý

As the days ticked toward the murder trial, lawyer Hicks worried about the choices Chris had made. He wondered: should he put him on the witness stand to tell his side of the story, given those choices?

“It ruined the image of him as this nice young Black kid ... that’s what I was trying to sell. And that got sort of sullied on the way through.”