Second arrest in bizarre murder
Memorial held for ‘regular average guy’
HAMILTON, Ont . —Tim Bosma was a jokester, a mischievous man with a “crazy laugh,” but most of all he was just a regular guy — and it cost him his life, family and friends said Wednesday in a poignant tribute to a man whose death cast him in the national spotlight.
There was standing room only in a banquet hall in Hamilton, Ont., where hundreds of people gathered to remember the 32-year-old father who was killed after taking two men on a test drive.
Just as the memorial concluded, police announced they had made a second arrest in the case.
Police said Mark Smich, 25, of nearby Oakville, Ont., was one of the men who went on the fatal test drive. He is due in court Thursday to face a firstdegree murder charge.
A 27-year-old Toronto man, Dellen Millard, was already charged with first-degree murder, forcible confinement and theft of a vehicle.
Police say Bosma’s remains were found, burned beyond recognition, on a farm belonging to Millard.
Police have not disclosed an alleged motive, but family and friends at the memorial service focused on the senselessness of the doting father’s death.
“I know that there have been skeptics out there who seem unable to believe that Tim was not somehow involved in something,” his wife Sharlene Bosma said.
“This sort of thing doesn’t happen in Canada and it doesn’t happen to people like us.”
Her husband, the father who took their two-year-old daughter to her swimming lessons and changed her first diapers with trembling hands, was a normal guy, she said.
“(He was) a regular average guy who loved his family and his friends, who worked hard,” Sharlene Bosma said.
“It is difficult to accept that this regular average guy did a regular average thing, which so many do on a daily basis, and it tragically cost him his life.”
It is difficult to accept, she said, because then it means it could have happened to anyone.
“But for me, it didn’t happen to just anyone,” she said, fighting back tears. “It happened to my husband and the father of our child.
“Tim is my someone. He is my person, my other half.”
Though she and her husband knew almost immediately they were meant for each other, they were “just like every other married couple,” with their struggles and spats, she said.