Missing girls’ families accuse police of racism, incompetence

By Brendan Kennedy, Ottawa Citizen
September 5, 2009

KITIGAN ZIBI ANISHINABEG FIRST NATION, Que. — Lisa Odjick is stalked by nightmares of her missing granddaughter.

“One time I dreamt she was being held against her will,” she says. “I could hear her calling me.”

Maisy Odjick, 16, and her friend Shannon Alexander, 17, disappeared from the Kitigan Zibi-Maniwaki area, about 130 kilometres north of Ottawa, on Sept. 6, 2008. The house where they were last known to be was locked. There were no signs of foul play. The teens left behind purses, clothes, electronics, identification and even medication.

On the reserve, rumours abound of human trafficking, prostitution, drug use, even possible sightings of the teens in Montreal, Toronto or as far away as Arizona.

The girls’ parents accuse the Kitigan Zibi police of incompetence. They’ve called the Surete du Quebec, the provincial police force, complacent and racist. (Maisy lived on the reserve; Shannon resided in the nearby town of Maniwaki. It is a joint police investigation.) The parents say the investigation was botched from the start because the provincial police assumed the girls were runaways.

The provincial police won’t discuss the case. Const. Steve Lalande will say only that police are doing “everything humanly possible”_to find the girls.

And while that force says the girls ran away, Kitigan Zibi police say they have no such evidence.

“We didn’t really want to commit (to saying that they were) runaways right away,” explains Kitigan Zibi Police Chief Gorden McGregor. “They (the Surete du Quebec) felt that the information that they had — which is the same as ours — they felt that they were able to commit to that notion.”

Maisy’s mother, Laurie Odjick, says there was no ground search in the days after the girls went missing, for example, and it took police more than a month to seize the girls’ computers.

McGregor understands the families’ frustration, but says there has never been anything solid to investigate.

“We’re dumbfounded.”

Jurisdictional questions only add to the confusion: Maisy is registered to the Kitigan Zibi band; Shannon is Inuit and not registered to the band. Maisy’s mother says every time she asked the provincial police for updates, they referred her to reserve police.

At the outset, the girls’ files were kept apart, even though they went missing from the same place and were believed to be together. Kitigan Zibi police took Maisy’s file, while the provincial force had Shannon’s.

McGregor insists this was only the case with paperwork; police collaborated from the start.

“No matter what: We open up a file on Maisy; they open up a file on Shannon. We still work together on the file,” he said. In any case, after a couple of months, the files were formally joined.

Shannon’s father, Bryan Alexander, believes the provincial police wanted to wash their hands of the case so they gave it to the Kitigan Zibi police — a community force of eight officers.

“This happened in town, not on the reserve. They don’t care if a million . . . Indians go missing,” he said,

echoing the criticism that has been made of police forces across the country in what advocates say are hundreds of missing and murdered women cases.

The circumstances surrounding when the girls were last seen are not entirely clear. Alexander says that on Friday, Sept. 5, 2008, he left the teens at his home — just outside the reserve in Maniwaki — and went to Ottawa for the weekend to help his son paint his apartment.

Later that day, the girls mowed the lawn at Maisy’s grandmother’s home. When the work was done, Maisy announced plans to spend the night at Shannon’s house.

Later that evening, the girls hung out with friends in a park, across the street from the Polyvalente high school, where a dance was being held. A 15-year-old boy who was with the girls that night says the girls claimed they’d just smoked crack. He thought they might be joking, though they did seem drunk or high.

At some point between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m., Shannon got into a fight with a boy in the group. Shortly after, Shannon and Maisy left together — the last anyone saw of the girls.

Maisy’s Facebook account was last active at 10:31 p.m. that night.

When Alexander returned from Ottawa on Monday, the girls were nowhere to be found.

On Tuesday, Alexander called police. He’d assumed you had to wait 24 hours to file a missing person’s report.

Four days passed between the last sighting of the girls and that first contact with the police.

• Shannon’s story

Bryan Alexander raised his daughter alone. He explains that his wife, a crack addict, left when Shannon was about a year old. The father and daughter lived in Ottawa until Shannon was about six, moved to Hull, then settled in Maniwaki, where they have family.

As a child, Shannon enjoyed the outdoors where she and her father would ride three-wheelers or go fishing.

In her later teens, she grew argumentative and angry. After a fight with her principal, she quit school.

Sixteen at the time, her father says she enrolled at the adult education centre the following day. While attending night school, she struggled unsuccessfully to find work. She tried grocery stores, restaurants, tobacco shops.

“My daughter’s not stupid,” Alexander says, “she just looks native.” She became increasingly frustrated.

Almost two years before she disappeared, Shannon decided to find her mother. Although warned she might not like what she found, she took a bus to Ottawa and found her mother in a crack house. “She flipped out” and was never the same, he says.

Alexander is himself a former crack addict who struggles with alcoholism. He says he attends AA and NA meetings and hasn’t smoked crack since his daughter’s birth. He knows he wasn’t always the best father, but says he gave his daughter everything she needed.

Alexander says his daughter would sometimes leave home for a few days, but not without calling or leaving a note. She spent some months in a foster home at some point in the past few years, but he isn’t clear on the details.

At the time of her disappearance, Shannon was completing her last high school math credit and was enrolled in a nursing college in Mont-Laurier, where she planned to move.

• Maisy’s story

Laurie Odjick still remembers the day Maisy, the first of her four children, was born. “She was the hardest labour,” she says with a teary smile. “She was always thinking she could do things on her own.”

Maisy became an independent and rebellious teen who fought with her mother.

Almost a year before she disappeared, Maisy dropped out of school. Laurie knew Maisy was experimenting with marijuana and alcohol.

At 16, Maisy moved in with her 18-year-old boyfriend, an arrangement that lasted about a month. She next moved in with her grandmother.

Maisy’s grandmother convinced her to try to finish high school. She had re-enrolled at Maniwaki’s adult education centre and was scheduled to resume her studies days before she disappeared.

Maisy made no secret of her desire to get away from Kitigan Zibi. She often spoke about moving back to the Saugeen Shores-Port Elgin, Ont. area, where she lived from 2003 to 2006, and where she still has friends and family.

In any case, Laurie says, Maisy would have taken her favourite possessions — family photos, and her camera, clothes and jewelry.

Laurie Odjick has been vocal and proactive in her hunt for answers. With the help of her sister-in-law, Maria Jacko, Odjick has organized searches and raised $12,000 in reward money. Every month she sends posters of Maisy and Shannon to women’s shelters across the country.

© Copyright (c) Canwest News Service

The search for Maisy and Shannon

'I feel like I’m fighting this on my own,’ mother says
BY BRENDAN KENNEDY, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
March 9, 2009

OTTAWA — Laurie Odjick says the hardest part of dealing with a missing child is “the not-knowing.”

“I need to know — and I may never know,” she said. “There are a lot of women out there who have never been found ... I don’t want my daughter to become another statistic.”

Laurie’s daughter, Maisy, and her close friend, Shannon Alexander, both 17, were last seen on Sept. 6 in Maniwaki, Que., about 140 kilometres north of Ottawa, when Shannon’s father left them at his home on Koko Street, which borders the Kitigan Zibi Anishinabeg First Nation, the reserve where Maisy lives.

With six months now passed since the teens went missing, and little or no progress made toward finding them, Odjick says she feels totally alone.

“I’ve never felt so alone, and I feel like I’m fighting this on my own,” she said.

But mingling with Odjick’s despair is simmering anger and frustration with what she considers a sluggish and complacent response by the two police departments investigating her daughter’s disappearance.

“I honestly believe my daughter’s rights were violated because she didn’t have a proper investigation

at all,” she said, adding that she

believes police treated the girls as runaways from the start and only put a half-hearted effort into finding them.

Sûreté du Québec Const. Steve Lalande said parents have a right to be frustrated, but police are taking the case seriously.

“There are no files that are unimportant to the SQ,” he said. “Rest

assured, the SQ is putting every effort into recovering the two youths.”

Kitigan Zibi Police Chief Gordon McGregor said it’s natural for family members to be frustrated with

police in a case such as this, where there is little progress.

“I can understand the families’ frustrations — we share the same frustrations,” he said. “But we’re not getting any information that’s really conclusive.”

The Kitigan Zibi Police department and the Sûreté du Québec

are jointly investigating the case

because Maisy lived on-reserve and Shannon lived off.

Despite keeping all options technically open, the Sûreté du Québec now says they have evidence to suggest the teens ran away.

“We always keep the possibility that something could have happened but, right now, we have reason to believe that these people left wilfully,” said Lalande. “We have no indications of foul play.”

This is the first time the Sûreté du Québec has said they believe the girls ran away, but Lalande could not confirm if there had been any change in the case.

He declined to provide the evidence that was leading police in this direction, saying it would interfere with an ongoing investigation.

The Kitigan Zibi police, however, said they have no such evidence.

Odjick, a radio broadcaster and mother of four, says she has no idea what evidence the Sûreté du Québec is speaking of.

“If they left voluntarily, why didn’t they take their stuff?” Odjick said. “(Maisy) even had a little bit of cash in her wallet. Why wouldn’t she take it? … It’s hard to believe and I don’t believe it.”

There was no sign of forced entry or robbery at the home on the day the teens went missing, but all of their belongings, including their clothes, wallets and IDs, were left behind.

Maisy’s and Shannon’s parents have accused the The Kitigan Zibi police of being unprepared and slow to act, and the Sûreté du Québec of using jurisdictional obstacles as an excuse for what the parents call an ineffective investigation.

The first extensive ground search for Maisy and Shannon was organized by the Odjick family, and did not take place until December, after several heavy snowfalls had blanketed the area.

Though the two police forces have been collaborating since the girls went missing, the The Kitigan Zibi police initially only had Maisy’s file and the Sûreté du Québec was responsible for Shannon’s, despite the fact the teens went missing together and are believed to still be together.

Recently, the forces combined the files, and now jointly hold both.

Lalande said working with other police departments can slow the investigation process.

“The more players you have, it doesn’t go as easy as it should,” he said, but would not elaborate.

In the fall, there were several reported sightings of the girls in Montreal, Ottawa, Kingston and Port Elgin, near Lake Huron, where Maisy once lived. Most were proven false, but the Sûreté du Québec now says sightings in Ottawa and Kingston have been confirmed.

Since Christmas, however, the case has been absolutely cold.

Odjick is reluctant to raise the issue of race, but she said she does wonder whether the girls’ disappearance would have garnered more attention if they were not aboriginal.

She cited the widespread media coverage and massive, police-led searches for Brandon Crisp, the 15-year-old Barrie boy who ran away on Oct. 13 and was found dead three weeks later.

“I’m not happy for the outcome, of course,” she said. “But I’m envious of the attention.”

A $10,000 reward — made up of donations from friends and supportive organizations — is being

offered by the families for any information that leads to Maisy’s and Shannon’s safe return.

Missing friends

- Shannon Alexander is five-foot-nine, 145 pounds, with brown eyes and dark brown hair. She has acne and pierced ears, often wears a silver necklace with a feather on it, and has a scar on her left knee.

- Maisy Odjick is six feet tall, 125 pounds, with brown eyes and black hair. She has two piercings in her bottom lip and one in her left nostril, and scars on top of her right eyebrow and left forearm.

Shannon and Maisy are believed to be together. If you have any information about their whereabouts, call the Sûreté du Québec at 819-310-4141 or the Kitigan Zibi Police Department at 819-449-6000. There is a $10,000 reward for information that leads to their safe return.

For more information, visit www.findmaisyandshannon.com

© Copyright (c) The Ottawa Citizen