EDMUNDSTON, New Brunswick – Seven months after being transferred to a Canadian prison to complete his sentence for manslaughter in the death of a fellow student at the University of Maine at Fort Kent, Dean Michaud walked off a bus Tuesday, placing his feet on his home soil in Madawaska County, New Brunswick, for the first time in more than 10 years.

Michaud, 29, walked off the bus into the arms of his mother, father, two brothers and more than 40 family members and friends who were waiting in the rain.

Released on Tuesday, he must report nightly to a provincial jail in St. Hilaire, New Brunswick, about 20 miles from where his parents live in Clair, New Brunswick. He must stay in the jail nights and is free during the day, because there are no halfway houses or similar facilities in the area. It was unclear Tuesday how long Michaud has to spend nights in jail.

It was a touching moment for Michaud who was arrested Nov. 8, 1996, in the beating and drowning of a fellow student at UMFK. He was convicted of manslaughter 14 months later in Aroostook County Superior Court.

The SMT bus pulled into the bus terminal on Victoria Street in Edmundston at 5:40 p.m. Some had been waiting for an hour. One friend drove from Quebec City for the homecoming.

Lucien and Nicole Michaud and one of their other two sons, David Michaud, an Ottawa, Ontario, lawyer who worked to get his brother into a Canadian prison and now freed, would not speak with the press Tuesday.

Michaud was sentenced in Maine to 16 years with all but 13 suspended in January 1998. He was also sentenced to three years probation.

Including the time he spent behind bars awaiting trial, Michaud served nine years and eight months in Maine prisons. He served about seven months in a high level security facility at Springhill, Nova Scotia, since he was transferred from Maine last May.

Michaud was convicted by Justice Susan Calkins in a five-day nonjury trial at Caribou.

“This is a touching time for this family,” Louis Labrie, a family friend who lives across the street from the Michauds in Clair, said at the bus stop. “I am still convinced after all these years that he did not throw the first punch in whatever happened at the river.

“He was never a violent person,” Labrie said. “I would not have let my kids play with a violent friend.”

“This was an unfortunate incident years ago,” Canadian Senator Pierrette Ringuette-Maltais said at the bus stop. “He [Michaud] is a great kid who got involved in a very serious situation.

“He’s finally home,” she said of the brother of two of her employees in Canada’s capital city.

According to investigators in the case in 1996, Michaud, 19 at the time and a second semester student at UMFK, assaulted Thomas Maki on the banks of the St. John River at Frenchville. He had lured Maki to the site to discuss a girl both men were dating.

According to testimony at the trial, a fight broke out and Maki lost his life. Maki was said to have been beaten and he was drowned.

Michaud’s parole was not such a happy occasion for Rosemarie Maki, mother of the young man Michaud was convicted of killing.

She could not be reached by telephone or e-mail Tuesday. But late last week she sent an e-mail about Michaud.

“He served a mere 10 years for callously and maliciously taking my son’s life with his bare hands,” she wrote, adding she still believes Michaud is dangerous.

“Never once did he show or relate remorse for killing my son,” she continued. “In fact, the only thing that he was sorry for, and verbalized at sentencing was the fact that he got caught and was found guilty.”

To this day, Maki decries the lack of justice she feels her son received in Maine.

Michaud’s transfer to a Canadian penitentiary last spring was approved by the U.S. Department of Justice and a federal judge in Bangor.

At the time of his release from a Maine prison last May, David Michaud said his brother was “not paroled or released,” but transferred to a Canadian jail. He said his brother had a three-year probationary period on his sentence, and Canadian authorities don’t have to honor that.

Michaud served a large part of his sentence at the Maine State Prison. He was transferred to the Charleston Correctional Facility several months before being released from there in May 2006.

Had he remained in a Maine prison, Michaud would have been eligible for release in March 2008.

Michaud’s family had been requesting his transfer for eight years.