‘Everybody knows suite four’ neighbours recall seeing Tina Fontaine at Furby St. apartment

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This article was published 12/06/2015 (3745 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

None of the residents at the four-storey Furby Street apartment block admitted seeing prostitution going on inside the building, but all admitted the basement suite where Tina Fontaine’s cousin lived — and another family member’s unit three flights up — have been problems for some time.

And some admitted seeing Tina Fontaine just a day or so before the 15-year-old was found dead in the Red River last year.

“Everybody knows suite four,” said a man who asked not to be identified.

“I just mind my own business. I just keep to myself. But there are drug deals going on in the halls outside. If you say something they say they’ll call someone to beat you up.

“This was a very nice building when I first came here, but not now.”

Another tenant, Barbara Lacquette, said she has had enough of the strangers coming into her building at all hours of the day and night.

And Lacquette wishes she had seen Fontaine one more time.

“I go out now and tell people to stop what they are doing,” she said.

“People break the lights in the hallway. I said would you guys leave the premises? I said if you don’t remove your butts I’ll call the police. We’ve had enough of this.”

Lacquette said she bumped into Fontaine a few days before she was found dead.

“I thought she would stay with her parents and family members so I asked if she was okay and she said I’m okay.

“Next thing I knew she was gone. She had looked a little distraught and scared. She should have been with her family elsewhere, but then again, who can you trust?

“If I’d seen her again, I would have put my arms around her.”

The front door of the building is locked, a push button call box on the exterior to the left. There are no names or suite numbers of the residents in view.

Once you enter the building, a short flight of steps leads down in front of you before you enter the basement hallway to the first suites.

A few doors down, on your left, is suite four. Screwed on to the exterior of the white door is a U-ring which a hinge mechanism and then a padlock would normally go through to lock the door on the outside, but there is no sign the rest of this type of locking mechanism needed was ever on the door or the frame.

A tenant further down the hallway said people used to walk down the hallway to the suite all the time, but since police arrested three people last week for allegedly holding a 17-year-old girl captive and forcing her to have sex with dozens of men, it has become quiet.

“They were coming in all hours of the night,” he said.

“It was just people coming and doing. They would whisper in the hallway and you would go out and yell you’re whispering, but I can still hear you.

“They were a mixed group of young and old. There was not one specific people. And there was a mixture of aboriginal and others.”

The tenant said he thought the comings and goings was a combination of drug trafficking and parties, not prostitution.

“I’d just open up my door and scream at them like everyone else,” he said.

“It has settled down a lot now, but they go upstairs to the other suite. It is the stairs that are noisy now.”

Upstairs, loud music emanated from a unit other tenants say is rented by Fontaine’s aunt, the mother of Jeanenne, who lived in the basement suite.

When a Free Press reporter identified himself to a male voice through the still closed door, the male said he didn’t want to comment.