A look back at a suspicious death in Seager Wheeler with former journalist David Scharf, 41 years later

On Sept. 28, 1984, the Seager Wheeler Hall residence was host to a raucous dance in its 14th-floor lounge. Wine and beer were $3.75 and $1.25 a bottle, respectively, and with little security, alcohol and people flowed freely in and out of the function. 

Big, drunken parties at Seager Wheeler were characteristic of the time—the residence, which housed single students in units of six on co-ed floors, had a much rowdier reputation than the neighbouring highrises, which housed upper-year and graduate students and those with families.

What should have been just another night of unruly partying at Seager Wheeler would turn tragic when Shawn Reineke was found morbidly injured in a steel garbage bin on the residence’s ground floor around 4 a.m. on Sept. 29. 

Less than half an hour before, at some point between 3:30 a.m. and 3:45 a.m., Reineke had plummeted feet-first through the residence’s garbage bin from the 9th floor.

His right leg was visibly in a grisly condition; his ankle, thigh, heel and pelvis had been fractured. There were cuts all over his body. Internally, he suffered skull fractures as well as bleeding and bruising of the brain. By 10:33 p.m. the next day, Reineke would be declared dead after being taken off life support. 

While no charges were ever laid in Reineke’s death, evidence seems to suggest that Shawn did not enter the garbage chute unassisted that night at Seager Wheeler. 

It is widely believed that there was some sort of foul play involved in Reineke’s death, and one proponent of this theory is lawyer and former radio host David Scharf.

Scharf, who is a USask alumnus, documented the circumstances of Reineke’s death in 2016 as part of the requirements of a Master’s of Journalism thesis at Carleton University entitled Students still mum about Shawn Reineke’s death: An unsolved homicide from 1984 at the University of Saskatchewan. Scharf’s work, a 191-page volume, comprehensively reviewed archived material from the time, including photographs, articles, and the 727-page transcript of the coroner’s inquest. I read Scharf’s thesis and spoke with him to learn more about that night at Seager Wheeler.

Who was Shawn?

Friends and family remember him as being an incredibly active young man, always finding something to keep him busy. He could be stubborn, but he was also highly extroverted and thought highly of by everyone in his community. He was known for his kindness. 

The 18-year-old Reineke was not a student at the University of Saskatchewan. Hailing from Hodgeville, a small town in Southern Saskatchewan, he had moved to Saskatoon to try to find a direction after graduating. He planned to work while he figured out what he would like to do with his life—perhaps attend USask or Saskatchewan Polytechnic. Reineke ended up at the university party via an invite from a mutual friend from his hometown. 

Foul play and eerie coincidences

At 2:25 a.m., around an hour before he would plummet down the garbage chute, Shawn had been “pranked” by fellow Seager Wheeler partygoers. 

Passed out drunk, Reineke was covered with mustard and shaving cream, his boot was removed so that a toe tag could be attached to his bare foot with his “time of death,” and, most tragically, one partier even performed a mock “last rites” for him. 

None of the students responsible for the prank would come under police suspicion for involvement in Reineke’s death, as they were accounted for at the time of Shawn’s fall. The mock funeral, held just about an hour before Reineke would fall through the chute, was likely just a tragic, bone-chilling coincidence.

“It’s so crazy and compelling [that] there’s this ceremony, completely unrelated to him going down the chute. What a crazy coincidence that is, to hold the funeral for him and then later he’s dead, and I don’t think the guys who did that had anything to do with it,” Scharf remarked.

The presence of mustard and shaving cream on his body and the trail it left around Seager Wheeler is also important to help understand Reineke’s last moments. 

After being pranked, Reineke was carried onto the elevator and left there around 3 a.m. Shortly after, between 3:15 and 3:30 a.m., the same students who had left him began to search the building for Reineke to check on him, but he was no longer in the elevator. They reported seeing mustard and shaving cream spread across the elevator buttons and the 8th-floor lobby. From there, it made a trail up the 9th-floor stairwell in a manner which made it appear like Reineke had been crawling. 

They followed this trail to the alcove that contains the garbage chute, arriving there at some point around 3:40 a.m. Here, the students testified, there was shaving cream and mustard on the floor, on the handle to the chute and the inside and outside of the chute door. Notably, they indicated that there was nothing on the walls of the alcove—interesting, because eyewitnesses who had seen Reineke in his intoxicated state noted that when he wasn’t passed out, he had to support himself to stand up.

They thought that perhaps Reineke had just paused to vomit in the chute—the opening was relatively small, and it seemed unreasonable to the students that he would have gone down there. 

Based on the testimonies of people there that night, Reineke’s fall is placed between 3:30 and 3:45 a.m., and he was found around 4 a.m. When police arrived, they photographed a clean 9th-floor garbage chute around 4:40 a.m. This conflicts with the multiple eyewitness testimonies that stated there had been a trail of mustard and foam on and inside the chute. 

Reineke had left a trail everywhere he went—eyewitness testimony and police photographs of other locations show this—and yet, the chute was clean. Between 3:40 and 4:40 a.m., it appeared that someone had possibly cleaned the chute door, where there might have been incriminating fingerprints, and nowhere else. 

The investigating officers determined that the 12-by-15-inch opening could physically fit a person of Reineke’s stature, and that one could get in by themself, but it would require a lot of maneuvering and coordination to step the considerable height into the chute, open it and enter feet first. It also required the chute door to be broken to be able to fit someone (and it was indeed found this way), denoting a certain level of effort required to get a person into it. 

During our discussion, Scharf mentions another tragic element of this case: “There was evidence his mom worked at a hotel, and he had talked about going down the garbage chute at the hotel. This was really troubling to the police because he has said, ‘This is the fast way to get downstairs,’ or words to that effect. That’s pretty uncomfortable evidence, but also, I’ve seen the ridiculous photos of the people trying to fit themselves down the garbage chute to see if that would have been possible, and [the police] concluded it’s not very likely that he could have [got in himself].”

Is it possible that Reineke somehow got himself in there? Given Reineke’s extremely high level of intoxication, it’s improbable that he could enter it himself. He could barely walk that night. Furthermore, why would someone wipe down the chute? Although it certainly adds an element of doubt to the case, this revelation is most likely another instance of eerie foreshadowing, much like the mock funeral.

The Suspects 

On the night of Reineke’s death, two men who had been acting rowdy throughout the night, Kelly Ham and Ervin Reekie, were the last people seen with Reineke in the 9th-floor hallway moments before his fall. After officers arrived, they claimed that they heard Ham’s girlfriend, Shannon Freeman, crying outside of a suite and telling a friend that Ham “didn’t know what he was doing. He made a mistake.”

Upon hearing these words uttered, police suspicion was placed on Reekie and Ham, as well as Ham’s girlfriend, who they believed to be aiding them by obscuring information. They were placed under intense scrutiny at the coroner’s inquest into Shawn Reineke’s death, where they would deliver conflicting testimony.

The men had never met before that night of the party, and yet, the next day, they arranged to meet each other in Assiniboine Hall with their girlfriends. Ham called a mutual friend to get Reekie’s number. On the stand at the coroner’s inquest, Reekie would recount that they met to go to a movie. Ham said that they had met to discuss what had happened the night before. Police believed that there was an ulterior motive to this meeting—at this point, Ham had been questioned. Reekie had not. Police believed that they met so they could get their story straight. 

Most compellingly, the men would deliver conflicting testimony on the coroner’s stand regarding what they had seen on the 9th floor shortly before Reineke’s fall. They had been placed there with certainty around 3:30 a.m. by a separate witness, who saw them interact with Reineke. Reekie recalled seeing Reineke leaning against the wall for support. When asked, he said that Ham certainly would have seen him, too. Ham, however, testified that he had never seen Reineke on the 9th floor. 

“The evidence is certainly pretty compelling that those guys had something to do with something, and their own testimony between the two of them is completely different. One of them testified, ‘Shawn was there’, the other guy goes, ‘No, he wasn’t.’ There’s a drunk man covered in mustard, shaving cream, [lying] here that another witness has corroborated, and these two guys have totally different stories. That’s pretty fishy, that’s got a credibility issue,” explained Scharf.

There was never enough evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone was involved in Reineke’s death. While Reekie, Ham and Freeman had pressure applied to them on the stand at the coroner’s inquest, there was never enough evidence to even criminally charge them. Reekie and Ham had a valid reason to be on the 9th floor—their friend was in one of the suites. No one ever heard any sounds of a struggle. Their friends and girlfriends claimed they had been in a suite around the time Reineke would have fallen. 

Police deemed it almost certain that Reineke didn’t go down the chute himself. It would have been incredibly difficult at his level of intoxication, and it is still unclear why the chute seemed to be wiped down. It remains unknown to this day which of the Seager Wheeler partygoers—if anyone—was involved in Reineke’s fall.

Scharf’s Discoveries

When Scharf began writing his thesis, he intended to unveil new information and hopefully find a new break in Reineke’s case. Knowing the potential impact of bringing such revelations to light years later, Scharf chose to visit Reineke’s parents first to get their blessing to write the thesis.

“I went there to ask, ‘Do I have your blessing to do this? If I were to, quote, solve this case, there will be consequences to people.’ His dad was a ‘yes’; he would want those consequences to happen. [Reineke’s mom] said, ‘It’s been 20 years. I don’t want to ruin someone’s life.’ She thought of the people who committed that and thought, ‘What’s the point now?’ I thought that was pretty interesting and really kind of her.’

Ultimately, Scharf received the blessing of the family to write his thesis, but he didn’t find any new breaks in Reineke’s case that would lead to justice. However, he does believe that through his work, he proved that Ham’s girlfriend was certainly innocent.

“I mostly summarized [what was known]. The only thing that [I] truly revealed was I think I vindicated a young woman who got really hard pressed by the police at the time,” Scharf says. 

As previously mentioned, after police heard Freeman crying around 5 a.m. that Ham had not known what he had done, she was placed under intense scrutiny. There was no reason for her to know what had happened at that point in the morning, so shortly after Reineke’s fall, even though her words seemed to directly imply Ham’s guilt. Her statements to the police revealed little, only adding fuel to the fire, and she was directly accused on the coroner’s stand of being dishonest. 

“What the police never got in their own investigation was [that] there was a police officer at the scene who wasn’t supposed to be there, and he went upstairs and he spoke to her. When the police officers who [were supposed to be] there show up on the floor, they heard her talking about what had happened and thought, ‘Well, my god, she knows what’s happened, [she must be guilty].’ But the only reason she knew that was because the police had already talked to her. Typical of the police work of that era, people were pretty sloppy.”

As it turned out, she had a very innocent reason to have some idea of what had happened. When police were called, two uniformed officers responded and woke her to question her about Ham. 

Scharf notes in our discussion that the 80s were an era of sloppy police work, such as this case of the uniformed officers failing to note that they had already talked to her. It was reasonable that she was hysterically crying half an hour later, when detectives arrived and heard her. She had just been roused from her sleep to be questioned about her boyfriend’s involvement in the mortal injury of another man.

Scharf’s discovery of her innocence came when he appealed to the public for evidence while he was writing his thesis back in 2016, and a former Seager Wheeler resident sent him an essay she had written just a day after Reineke’s death.

“The young woman who got really under police scrutiny, her roommate wrote an essay the next day [after Reineke’s death], because her assignment was to describe some real-life crisis. [She writes that the] police officer came to the door and knocked, waking them up, and asked to speak to this girl. It’s eyewitness testimony,” Scharf revealed. 

The woman who wrote the essay was never questioned on the coroner’s stand, despite her recollection of events perfectly corroborating Freeman’s story. As a result, Freeman was accused on the stand of being dishonest by the prosecutor.

“My gut instinct is the narrative [that Reineke was murdered] is correct, but some people got really crushed in that, who shouldn’t have. That woman in particular was really just an innocent person in this and wound up getting pretty harsh treatment, just ripped to shreds on the stand at the coroner’s inquest erroneously.”

To this day

The case remains open to this day. Notably, in 1989, Chief of Police Sergeant Dave Scott stated that he had spent 4 months in 1987 investigating the case and had come to the conclusion that it was certainly an accident. 

He never closed the file, however. Scharf notes in his thesis that in a major crime, such as a homicide investigation, this requires a sign-off from superiors to confirm that they were satisfied with the findings. Scott never received this sign-off. It is also worth noting that he stated that he completed this investigation with the collaboration of none other than Ervin Reekie.

This case is filled with intricacies that can’t be fully explored in this article. I highly recommend reading Scharf’s thesis if you are interested in getting a comprehensive picture of what happened that night: https://carleton.scholaris.ca/server/api/core/bitstreams/42823e53-1d2e-4dc1-951c-23b233a80c27/content