THUNDER BAY – Families of four Indigenous youth who died while in Thunder Bay are still waiting to find out if the deaths will be reinvestigated.
The bodies of Jethro Anderson, Curran Strang, Kyle Morrisseau and Jordan Wabasse were found in Thunder Bay waterways between 2000 and 2011. The four youth were in the city to attend school away from their remote home communities and their deaths were included in the Seven Youth Inquest.
The cases, which were all initially investigated by the Thunder Bay Police Service, have not resulted in any findings of foul play. The inquest jury determined the means of death for Anderson, Morrisseau and Wabasse were all undetermined. The means of death for 18-year-old Strang was an accident.
The Office of the Independent Police Review Director report that examined the Thunder Bay Police Service’s investigations of Indigenous deaths recommended that those four cases by subject to a reinvestigation.
Those cases had been reinvestigated by the OPP prior to the start of the inquest in 2015.
Aboriginal Legal Services lawyers, who are representing three of the four families, said they have not received any definitive answer on how those cases will be handled.
Lawyer Jonathan Rudin said his legal team wrote both the OIPRD and the Thunder Bay Police Service to ask whether the deaths would be reinvestigated and what was going to be done.
“When they issued their report, they knew that in the context of the inquest the OPP reinvestigated the deaths,” Rudin said. “Obviously this is a crucial issue for our clients who want to know whether or not these deaths are going to be investigated or whether they’re not going to be reinvestigated. We frankly at this point don’t know.”
Thunder Bay police spokesperson Chris Adams later said police chief Sylvie Hauth will make the determination of whether the cases will be reinvestigated and that it is still under consideration.
The OIPRD review of the Anderson death investigation found that criminal investigators did not become involved until six days after the initial missing person report had been filed and then discounted evidence that suggested the possibility he was assaulted prior to his death. The 15-year-old's body was found in the Kaministiquia River in November 2000.
With Strang, the OIPRD described the police investigation as very limited, concluding that further probing should have been done to discover how he and others that were present prior to his death were able to obtain alcohol. The 18-year-old's body was found in the McIntyre River in September 2005.
The review of the Morrisseau investigation led to the OIPRD determining that police failed pursue leads and that many investigative steps outlined in the Adequacy Standard and best practices were not followed. The 17-year-old's body was found in the McIntyre River in November 2009.
The OIPRD review found compelling evidence that Wabasse was the victim of a crime and that police on multiple occasions failed to use sound or adequate investigative steps in their investigation. The 15-year-old's body was found in the Kaministiquia River near the James Street Swing Bridge in May 2011, three months after he had been last seen.
“We didn’t know the extent to which the inquest briefs, which were done by the OPP, what they reinvestigated,” Rudin said, adding they hadn’t seen much of the initial Thunder Bay police investigations so they didn’t know if the OPP had found anything new.
“We didn’t have that information. All the families knew was what came out at the inquest.”
Caitlyn Kasper, another lawyer with Aboriginal Legal Services, said the families want reinvestigations to be done with a multi-disciplinary team that isn’t just city police.
“I think that weighs heavily on the families and when the recommendation is that these deaths be reopened, it’s asking for those concrete answers of how is that going to happen, who’s going to be involved and are we going to be kept updated,” Kasper said.
