The cold, dark ocean waters of Burrard Inlet offered Sereena Abotsway the spiritual home she sought but never found on the hopeless streets of Vancouver's Downtown Eastside.
Abotsway wanted to be baptized in an ocean-front ceremony mere steps away from the hell-hole neighbourhood where she lived.
Sereena Abotsway
"She asked to be baptized," says Cheryl Bear Barnetson, who recalls Abotsway attending the street church she ran with her husband, Randy, at Vancouver's Main and Hastings, the heart of the area known as the War Zone.
"We baptized her right near the church at what people in the Downtown Eastside called Crab Park," she says.
"It was good to see how the Lord was beginning to touch her and move in her life."
Abotsway's life was always about hope even when the abyss was all she knew.
She lived and worked in one of Canada's most desolate and dangerous neighbourhoods but she fought loneliness and heartbreak with an infectious laugh and selfless acts of kindness, even though she may have guessed a dark fate awaited her and many of her friends.
Friends on the eastside remember Abotsway's raw zeal for life in the midst of human decay and despair.
"She'd gotten a grey rabbit fur coat," says Maggy Gisle, a recovering drug addict who spent 16 years on the Downtown Eastside streets before getting clean and getting out.
"And she wore that thing everywhere. I mean, it was just a cheap rabbit fur coat. But she just thought it was a million bucks, it was the best thing she had and she wore it all the time."
Gisle says one time, Abotsway was seen standing on a corner, wearing the coat and high heels and nothing else.
"When I heard that, I laughed and said, 'Yep, she loved it.' She absolutely loved it."
Abotsway was 29 years old when her foster mother reported her missing to police on Aug. 22, 2001.
She had participated in community marches calling for deeper investigations into the disappearances of women from the Downtown Eastside before she herself became one of them.
She wanted her missing friends to know she cared, that she was concerned.
"When you went missing each and every year, we all fought so hard to find you," Abotsway wrote in a poem posted on the Internet on one of several sites dedicated to the missing women of Vancouver.
"You were all part of God's plan. He probably took most of you home. But he left us with a very empty spot."
When she disappeared, police had a warrant for her arrest for stealing chocolate bars.
Between Jan. 22, 1998, and July 19, 2001, she had 26 run-ins with police, according to an admission of facts presented to a jury hearing the trial for the man charged with killing her and five other women.
They included two complaints of sexual assault and that she'd been picked up and robbed.
The last time police had any contact with her was June 17, 2001.
Abotsway saw doctors a lot more often, filling more than 300 prescriptions over a six-year period.
The last ones were on July 16 and 19 of 2001, both for asthma inhalers, court documents show.
An inhaler with her name on it spotted in Robert Pickton's trailer during a police search for guns was what led to the massive investigation on the Pickton farm culminating in charges for her death and the deaths of 25 others.
Jurors began deliberations Friday to reach a verdict in six of the murders, including Abotsway's. A trial on the other 20 charges is to be held later.
Abotsway had few teeth left in her mouth -- beatings and drug use took their toll -- but she insisted on ordering steak dinners.
The sight of her attempting to eat a steak was a matter of humour and tragedy whenever she would get together with her foster parents, Bert and Anna Draayers.
The Draayers say she promised to be home with them in August to celebrate her 30th birthday, but she never arrived.
She lived with the Draayers from age four until she was 17, when her violent behaviour saw her placed in a group home where she was introduced to drugs and an eventual life of soul-destroying survival on the streets.
"She was sweet and bubbly but she was very disturbed," Draayers told a Vancouver newspaper in 2002.
"She gave her teachers a headache and we tried to teach her at home but there was not much you could do. At that time we did not have a name for the condition but it is now known as fetal alcohol syndrome."
Abotsway used to call the Draayers every day, but the calls stopped and then came word that her remains had been identified.
They were found in a freezer on Pickton's property on June 4, 2002, five months after the investigation began. Abotsway's head, hands and feet were frozen in a white, five gallon plastic bucket, jurors at the trial heard, and further evidence suggested they'd been exposed to the elements for two or three weeks before they were frozen.
Unidentified DNA was found in her teeth.
Four inhalers with her name on them had been in a garbage bag outside Pickton’s trailer. There was a silver gym bag, a Bible, two syringes and a pair of shoes.
A piece of her hair and clothes with her DNA on them were found there as well.
Both Abotsway's and Pickton's DNA was found on two syringes, the only evidence the jury heard explicitly linking her and the accused in some way.
Barnetson remembers Abotsway as a regular at the church, where services -- including hot dogs -- started in the evenings and often continued well into the night.
A dry room and a compassionate ear were deeply appreciated by the eastside residents, who would pour out their hearts during the services, Barnetson says.
Barnetson says she vividly recalls the night Abotsway helped a man nobody wanted to touch.
"I don't know if he was high or drunk or what, but he had ... you could just kind of smell that he had gone to the bathroom in his pants," Barnetson says.
"It was just ... he was a mess. She just jumped in right away with no hesitation and just started helping him. She just knew what to do."
Gisle says Abotsway, who always had a teddy bear with her, was a special needs person.
One of Abotsway's boyfriends introduced her to drugs and then sent her out to the streets to work as a prostitute. She endured several abusive relationships and once was beaten into a coma by a bad date.
Gisle says Abotsway would spend her days in the bars looking for men who would buy her drinks and drugs. At night, she was on the streets as a prostitute.
She was a regular at WISH, a safe-house for sex trade workers on the Downtown Eastside, Elaine Allan testified at the trial.
Allan, who used to run the centre, recalled that Abotsway had "track marks" on the veins of her arms and legs and used to keep her syringes in her outside pocket.
"I told her to put them away," Allan told the court.
But Abotsway took good care of herself despite her special needs and her drug addiction, says Gisle.
That seemed to come from something in her past, that she was taught to take care of herself, clean up.
"She came with Barbie dolls and teddy bears and they filled her room," Gisle says. "She had a child-like innocence.”
Abotsway's biological parents both died young. Her father died drug-addicted on the Downtown Eastside.
Barnetson says she believed Abotsway considered the Main Street church a place of refuge.
There were times she would be crying at the altar and others where she was offering to help in any way she could.
"We did definitely see the bright side of Sereena," she says. "It was great to know her in that short period of time. She always had a smile for everybody. A big hello.
"It was really tragic when we saw her picture on the missing women's list."
Barnetson says the heavy cloud of despair that hangs over the Downtown Eastside was too much for many people, but Abotsway wouldn’t give up -- she fought the heavy weight despite her difficulties.
"In the neighbourhood of the Downtown Eastside, it's a really difficult place to be and in some sense it seems like it's hopeless," says Barnetson.
"And yet there are moments in people's lives where they have such clarity and they come to this understanding of themselves and of God."
Abotsway was one of many who were baptized in the chilly waters of Burrard Inlet.
She was seeking hope, Barnetson says, because she still understood what that meant.
"It was just a tragic ending, though."
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