Josh and Lorene Kakegamic, Kyle Morriseau’s brother and mother, in Thunder Bay earlier this month following their meeting with the reinvestigation team.Willow Fiddler/The Globe and Mail
There was a two-year age difference between Josh Kakegamic and his older brother Kyle Morriseau, but the two boys were so inseparable that their mother, Lorene Kakegamic, would dress them in matching outfits, as if they were twins.
When 17-year-old Kyle went off to attend his second year of high school in Thunder Bay in the fall of 2009 – more than 500 kilometres from their small remote community of Keewaywin First Nation – Josh planned to follow the next semester. He looked forward to reuniting with his sibling.
Kyle died before that happened, his body found floating in the McIntyre River by a passerby more than two weeks after he was reportedly last seen in Thunder Bay on Oct. 26, 2009. His face and legs were injured.
It wasn’t the first time an Indigenous person was found in the river, and the deaths sounded the alarm for families and communities whose children were being returned home in coffins from Thunder Bay.
More than a decade later, Kyle’s case is one of nine sudden deaths of Indigenous people – including three other students – that have been reinvestigated after a 2018 report by the Office of the Independent Police Review Director (OIPRD) found that Thunder Bay police failed to conduct proper initial investigations. That report, Broken Trust: Indigenous People and the Thunder Bay Police Service, reviewed 37 investigations going back to 2009, and singled the nine out for another look.
The reinvestigations are now complete, according to Ontario’s chief coroner, Dirk Huyer. He met recently with Ms. Kakegamic and her children Josh and Christin in a Thunder Bay hotel boardroom to provide an update, along with other members of the reinvestigation team, including lead investigator and retired provincial police officer Ken Leppert, and Randy Cheechoo of the Anishinabek Police Service. Staff members and an elder from First Nations organizations were also there to support the family.
“We shared all of the investigative information, and we talked about some of the lessons learned that the team identified,” said Mr. Huyer, who has met with five of the nine families so far, and plans to talk with them all in person.
But Josh and Ms. Kakegamic remain frustrated with a lack of substantive information or progress related to Kyle’s case. Josh said he provided investigators with tips two years ago and never heard back. He doesn’t believe the reinvestigation team followed any of those leads, and said he was told at the recent meeting that they would continue to investigate when he inquired.
Communication with the family has been sparse, Ms. Kakegamic said. Other than the 2019 meeting, the only time she recalls being contacted is when someone phoned last summer to ask whether she wanted counselling – something her family has already been participating in since Kyle’s death.
“I feel like it’s still far away from being done,” Josh said. “Because I haven’t gotten any updates and I just keep getting the same information for the past four years.”
This is the third police investigation into Kyle’s death, which was ruled an accidental drowning with acute ethanol intoxication.
In 2015, a coroner’s inquest examined the deaths of seven First Nations students who died in Thunder Bay between 2000 and 2011. Five of them were found in city rivers. The coroner said they were all drownings, two of them determined accidental and three undetermined, including Kyle’s.
While the inquest was taking place, another First Nations person was found in the McIntyre River. Within hours of Stacy DeBungee’s body being discovered on October 19, 2015, Thunder Bay police ruled out foul play and said the Anishinaabe man had likely passed out and rolled into the water. The coroner ruled his death a drowning.
Mr. DeBungee’s family and home community of Rainy River First Nation didn’t buy it.
They filed a complaint with the OIPRD, upset that police were treating him as another “drunk Indian.” Their complaint triggered the sweeping examination of the Thunder Bay Police Service that resulted in the Broken Trust report. It “revealed systemic failings” in regards to Mr. DeBungee’s death, and the officers involved in the initial investigation face a disciplinary hearing for discreditable conduct and neglect of duty. While the case was not one of the nine put forward for review, it was recommended that a multidiscipline team assess whether it should also be looked at; on Oct. 19 the OPP announced it is investigating Mr. DeBungee’s death.
The OIPRD called Kyle’s death suspicious in its report, and found that many investigative steps were not completed. Officers weren’t in a position to rule out foul play, according to then-director Gerry McNeilly. The report also pointed out that investigators used evidence of intoxication, hypothermia and drowning to determine Indigenous deaths accidental. “Systemic racism exists” in the Thunder Bay Police Service at an “institutional level,” Mr. McNeilly wrote, concluding that some investigations were affected by racial discrimination.
The length of the reinvestigations has been hard on families. The process, started in June of 2019, was expected to take a year to complete but then the pandemic hit, causing delays because of restrictions on travel to the remote, fly-in communities where many of the families live.
A final report will be prepared “over the next number of months,” Mr. Huyer said, and will include a summary of the work and outcomes, but not full investigative details. There are certain legal limitations to what can be released to the families, he said, and there will be “some redactions.” He could not specify how the findings will be different from the previous investigations.
The report will also address lessons learned, and there will likely be recommendations. Mr. Huyer said. The reinvestigation team – which included members from the Thunder Bay police, the RCMP, the OPP, Nishnawbe Aski Police Service and other First Nations policing – is also asking families for feedback on the whole process, including the initial investigations.
For now, Kyle’s family can only hope they will get answers and an outcome that’s different from previous investigations.
Josh said he was originally supposed to join Kyle at school the year he died, but the brothers ended up getting into an argument and Josh stayed home. It’s something he’s had to make peace with, and he never did go out to finish high school.
Now, Josh said, each year around the anniversary of his brother’s death on Nov. 10, he has a recurring dream that he’s arriving in a taxi to visit Kyle at their father’s old house in Thunder Bay. It’s where Kyle used to wait for him at the living-room window. In the dream Kyle takes him up to his bedroom on the third floor – but that’s when Josh wakes up.
“He’s trying to show me something,” Josh said, adding he would like to visit the house again some day.
Our Morning Update and Evening Update newsletters are written by Globe editors, giving you a concise summary of the day’s most important headlines. Sign up today.