An elderly camper who was kicked out of a Thessalon, Ont. campground after her guest defecated beside a seasonal trailer is now demanding an apology from the municipally owned park.
Sault Ste. Marie resident Brenda Chisholm wanted to share her "side of the story," after a news release revealed that 39-year-old Mark Vasey of Thessalon was charged by Ontario Provincial Police for allegedly threatening campground staff after campers were evicted Sept. 7.
Chisholm scoffed at that allegation Thursday. “Mark did not threaten that employee. That’s a complete lie,” she said.
Chisholm and her husband were renting a site at Lakeside Park Campground at the time of the incident. A longtime friend of her husband — who happens to be Vasey’s father — was at the campground visiting the couple that weekend. But Chisholm said that neither her nor her spouse were aware of their guest’s pre-existing “medical issue,” which was described to a reporter as “spastic bowels.”
“He got up in the morning and had to go to the bathroom — and he didn’t make it, basically,” Chisholm recalled.
Their guest was subsequently spotted by a campground staffer releasing the contents of his bowels in the great outdoors.
“The park employee just happened to be going by in his truck, and rolled down the window and started yelling at him,” said Chisholm. “He was very ignorant — he was like, ‘did you just sh-- in the park? I’m calling the cops!’ and just peeled away.”
After cleaning up the fecal matter, Chisholm said she proceeded to the campground office to speak with the employee. She also enlisted Vasey, who was aware of his father’s health issue, to accompany her to the office in order to confront the employee that morning.
“He wouldn’t even speak to us,” Chisholm said. “He just locked the door and said, ‘get out of here, I’m calling the cops.’ Mark was trying to tell him, ‘my dad’s not well and he’s got this problem.’ He had three adult diapers in his hand and food for his dad.”
Police eventually arrived on scene, giving the senior citizens an hour to pack up and leave — without a place to stay, nor any means of hauling the trailer out of the campground.
“I contacted my lawyer when the police came, because they just kicked us out — they didn’t even give us a chance to explain. They just wanted us out of the park,” Chisholm said.
But ask Lakeside Park Campground employee Tyler Parker, and he has a radically different take on what went down on the morning of the all-too-public defecating. He says that prior to his afternoon shift, he received a text — along with photos — of what his coworker witnessed after responding to a report of a man relieving himself out in the open.
“You could clearly see the guy, you could see the toilet paper and the feces on the ground,” Parker said of the photos.
The situation soon went down the toilet — figuratively, of course — after a staffer informed the senior citizens they had to leave the campground.
Parker said that Vasey later approached the park staffer who evicted the campground guests, while yelling and being “belligerent” towards him. The staffer then went inside the office and called police while Parker stayed outside to “calm them down” in the meantime.
He added that Chisholm stayed behind after Vasey fled on foot. “She’s yelling at us through the mail slot — ‘I’m gonna sue you guys, you can’t do this, this is discrimination.’ Like, all kinds of things,” he said.
Responding officers identified Vasey using video surveillance footage. He was eventually located, arrested and charged by police with uttering threats - cause death or bodily harm.
After all of the chaos had dissipated, Lakeside staffers took on the rather unenviable task of finding the feces that had been cleaned up off of the ground earlier that morning.
“They cleaned it up, but that feces is somewhere in the park — in our garbage,” said Parker. “So, we gotta find that before someone ends up getting it on their hands, or getting sick.”
They eventually located the excrement in one of the park’s trash bins. “It was right beside a kid’s playground, where they threw it out,” he continued. “The smell was just overwhelming — like, you could see it through the bag. Completely putrid smell.”
The campground has since issued Chisholm a full refund for the campsite, but that’s not enough: She is now calling on the Town of Thessalon to apologize and to terminate the campground staffer who evicted senior citizens for public defecation.
“He’s just a complete idiot. He just does not know how to treat people — very unprofessional in his field,” said Chisholm. “He should at least be listening to the other side of the story, you know?”
Chisholm said she now wants to take legal action against The Town of Thessalon, which owns the campground, for "senior mistreatment." The municipality did not respond to a request for comment for this article.
Chisholm has also filed a complaint against East Algoma OPP and is demanding that the criminal charge laid against the son of her husband’s friend is dropped. Vasey is scheduled to appear in court in Elliot Lake on Oct. 3.
The allegations have not been tested in court and Vasey is presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
