STING OPERATION

News anchor Tiffany Burns leaves broadcasting to tackle injustice in her first film Mr. Big

By Maile Martinez

Photo: Sebastian Burns in police custody

Tariq and Sultana Rafay and their autistic daughter Basma were beaten to death in their Bellevue home in 1994. Their son Atif and his friend Sebastian Burns were visiting from Vancouver, Canada at the time; the Bellevue police, shortly after discovering the bodies, targeted the teens as murder suspects.

Despite the dearth of physical evidence linking the two to the crime, including eyewitness testimony and an alibi that placed them across town at the time of the murder, undercover officers of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) posing as mafiosos obtained a confession and arrested them.

At the time of the arrest and trial, Sebastian’s sister, Tiffany Burns, was working as a broadcast journalist for a CBS affiliate in Cleveland, Ohio. As she got involved in her brother’s case and learned more about the dubious RCMP tactics that led to his conviction, she realized that the public needed to know about it. “I decided to quit my job and move to Vancouver to make a documentary,” she says.

With Mr. Big, Burns drew on her background as a television news journalist to investigate the issues surrounding her brother’s arrest. The result is part news-anchor expose, part legal docu-drama, and part diary of an upper-middle class family struggling with the reality that their son and brother Sebastian has been convicted of a heinous crime – perhaps wrongfully, and certainly due to dubious police tactics.

It took first-time filmmaker Burns just a year to complete the film. She attributes the short production timeline to her training in TV news. “I’ve been in broadcast news for ten years,” she says. “I have a lot of experience with one-minute stories – they are like really short films in a way.”

The sting operation that generated the confession is known in Canada as “Mr. Big.” When the RCMP has too little evidence to charge a suspect with murder, they commonly launch an elaborate scenario in which they pose as mobsters and offer the suspect money, power, and respect to just “tell the truth.”

Over a period of weeks, RCMP “mobsters” continually pressured Sebastian and Atif to admit to killing the Rafays, and finally recorded the confessions via hidden video camera. But the boys insist that the confessions were false – and are even contradicted by physical crime scene evidence. They say they lied about killing the Rafays just to satisfy the intimidating pseudo-mafiosos.

In the United States, confessions garnered under such elaborate circumstances are considered the result of entrapment and are not allowed in court. The murders occurred on US soil and were tried in King County, but since the accused are Canadian citizens, the jury was allowed to see their videotaped confessions. Based on this normally inadmissible evidence, the jury convicted both young men. They are currently serving life sentences in Washington State prisons.

Photo: Tiffany Burns in the courtroom

Mr. Big’s most touching moments come at times when Burns addresses the camera, admitting how she will steer casual conversations away from the topic of family, so she won’t have to reveal that her brother is serving time for murder. In one sequence, Burns’ father and Sebastian play a word puzzle over the phone – until the call’s abrupt end when Sebastian is forced to return to his cell.

“Some have said I was too close to the topic,” Burns admits. “But I kind of thought that was the whole point.”

Burns describes her filmmaker experience as atypical: “I made a film about something that I hate talking about because it bothers me so much. I hate that my brother is in jail.”

After Mr. Big’s screening run this year, Burns plans to return to broadcasting. She would love to make documentaries full-time, she says, but after making a film on such a sensitive, personal subject, “I probably need an emotional vacation.”

Photo: Tiffany Burns

CREW BOX: Mr. Big
www.mrbigthemovie.com
Director/Producer: Tiffany Burns
Editor: Alec MacNeill Richardson