SHE'LL BE THERE FOR HER FATHER ...

YORKTON -- If Jadah Walker truly owes her life to her father, she is
repaying that debt to her family and to other families scarred by drugs.

A day after a jury found 50-year-old Kim Walker guilty of
second-degree murder, Jadah returned to some aspects -- the small
apartment she shares with her boyfriend, the manager's job she holds
at Carlton Cards -- of the normal life she tried to build in the four
years after her father shot dead her drug dealer boyfriend, James Hayward.

But on that same day, she and her mother Liz dropped off items such
as chocolate bars and magazines for Kim Walker at the RCMP cells
where he has begun the minimum 10 years incarceration before the
possibility of parole in his life sentence.

"Anything that my family wants, I will do. Whatever I can do to help
my dad, I will," said the dark-eyed 20-year-old in an interview Saturday.

Sitting with a coffee at her kitchen table, Jadah said she will speak
out whenever she can because she wants people to learn from the case.

Many people have had their eyes closed to the drug problem that
exists, including the police, she said. Jadah feels the system failed
her parents -- that if the police had arrested Hayward earlier or
responded better to the concerns they raised, Kim Walker wouldn't be
behind bars today.

Her case also shows the value of "unconditional love" for children in
crisis, said Jadah.

"I don't want a situation like this to happen to anybody else," she said.

"You can never ever turn somebody away ... I would never have lived
through this without the support of my parents."

The Walker case has attracted national attention because of its
disturbing circumstances.

Many people in the eastern Saskatchewan city of 17,000, and from
across the country, have offered their support for Walker, a welder
and father of three who played the bagpipes and belonged to a gun
club in his spare time.

Many view him as the defence painted him -- a concerned father
desperate to extricate his 16-year-old daughter from a potentially
fatal addiction and a toxic relationship with an older man.

It's a view that troubles the friends and family of James Hayward,
who was 24 at the time he died. They point out that James is no
longer around to defend himself.

"A lot of people loved James and he had many great qualities
regardless of the way he earned money. James was a caring, funny,
supportive and compassionate person," said Hayward's stepsister Alana
Getty in a prepared statement on Friday just a few hours before the
verdict was delivered.

"No one knows what might have happened if James had not been killed.
Perhaps they both could have been saved but no one was given the
opportunity to save James ... Drug addiction is a serious and
difficult problem to resolve. They had just begun to work on Jadah's
rehabilitation when Mr. Walker took this extreme action."

Jadah Walker says she would have died if she had continued living
with Hayward for even a few more weeks.

She was 13 when she began smoking marijuana and she first met the
eight-years-older Hayward at that age when time when a friend
suggested they buy pot from him.

Hayward was a well-known figure around Yorkton, a bodybuilder also
known to be selling drugs.

Jadah was 15 when she became involved with him. When her relationship
with her parents deteriorated over changes to her behaviour and
attitude toward school, she moved out of her home and moved in with Hayward.

She has few kind words for him now and struggles to describe the
attraction at the time.

"He would walk around and have people with him and he would always be
at the front of the pack, Mr. Big Shot in a tight shirt," she said.

Living with him in late 2002 and early 2003, her marijuana use
escalated and she also began using ecstasy and mushrooms as
everything was in easy supply.

Eventually, she joined Hayward in injecting morphine.

"We were staying at somebody's house and all of a sudden these two
strange men came and they just started cooking it up," Jadah said of
her first use.

"Somehow he encouraged me to try it and persuaded me into doing it
that one time and it only seems like that one time and you're hooked
on it ... He was always doing it and he was always getting me to do
it and so it became something I needed to function,"

Months of growing concern from her parents culminated when they
received an anonymous letter telling them of Jadah and Hayward's morphine use.

After going to the RCMP, they received a court order that committed
Jadah -- who had lost a great deal of weight and was increasingly
zombie-like but was still attending school -- to the psychiatric ward
of the Yorkton hospital for assessment for the weekend.

"At the time I was like 'why would you do that to me?' ... I was
angry they would put me in with the crazy people," she said, adding
however that she was not "in a hurry" to go back to Hayward's home
when she was released.

On March 17, 2003, the Monday she was released to her parents, she
was picked up by friends at her parent's home and reunited with Hayward.

Hearing that, Kim Walker left his home with a semi-automatic pistol
and 30 rounds of ammunition. Almost immediately after entering
Hayward's house and asking a resistant Jadah to come home, he fired
10 shots. Hayward bled to death from five gunshot wounds, including
one in the back at close range.

Walker testified he did not intend to kill Hayward but said he
remembered only "flashes" of the day and nothing of the actual shooting.

Jadah, suffering from lack of food and sleep as she had withdrawals
from morphine, said she too remembers little of the shooting.

In the aftermath, she said it took months to get back to normal but
she was never estranged from her parents. Kim Walker was free on bail
for almost the entire time since the shooting until he was taken into
custody Friday.

With no more supply Jadah stopped using morphine on her own, refusing
to go into rehab.

"In the condition I was in, I was like 'how would it make me any
better to go be with a lot of cracked out strangers?' My family can
at the least build me up,"

Jadah smoked marijuana a few more times but then quit using drugs completely.

After a couple of months she went back to school. She graduated from
high school, began work and eventually wants to go back to school to
take business courses.

But the family must now deal with Kim Walker beginning incarceration
that will likely see him end up in the Prince Albert penitentiary.

Defence lawyer Morris Bodnar said Sunday he will work on his appeal this week.

It will be based on Justice Jennifer Pritchard's refusal to allow the
defence of self-defence and her charge to the jury that a finding of
guilty of at least manslaughter had to be found.

Jadah Walker said the family knows the case isn't over.

"I love my dad. It breaks my heart to see him in jail," she said.