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
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.
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
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
“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
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.
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