Tina Fontaine’s mother wants to meet her daughter’s alleged killer

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 14/12/2015 (3587 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It was Saturday morning, the day after Winnipeg police announced an arrest in the 16-month-long Tina Fontaine homicide case, and I was in Toronto awakening to an unexpected text message.

“Good Morning Gordon,” it began. “You can contact Tina’s mother at this number…”

That would be Tina Duck, the birth mother, and the person most media don’t bother to ask how she’s feeling when they go looking for family.

Maybe because “the family” doesn’t consider her family.

The message was from the man who put me in touch with the now-34-year-old soon after her runaway 15-year-old daughter was murdered last year. My contact was a regular at the century-old Mount Royal Hotel. Or more precisely, the beer parlour. It was there in the fall of last year that he introduced me to Big Tina, as I came to think of her as a way of differentiating the mother from the daughter.

“I texted her yesterday,” my man from the Mount Royal continued, “to tell her about the arrest.”

At that point, Big Tina hadn’t heard of Raymond Joseph Cormier, the 53-year-old drifter and compulsive criminal by the looks of his court records.

Cormier was arrested last week in the Vancouver area and is charged with second-degree murder.

There was more about Cormier in the text I received.

“People on the street today are saying he is familiar… some knew him from the Salvation Army… others said he was a meth head…”

And there was also more about Big Tina: “She was doing well for the last three months but is on a slide again.”

He was referring to her drinking.

“But she is holding her head high.”

Although, judging by what he added, not easily.

“I drove Tina to an appointment a couple of weeks ago, and as we drove down Waterfront Drive she was upset about the red dresses hanging at the spot.”

The red dresses, hanging here and there in the city, were displayed in memory of the more than 1,000 indigenous women and girls who are known have been murdered or have gone missing since 1980. The red dress that so disturbed Big Tina was hanging near the Alexander Docks, where police pulled Little Tina’s body from the Red River Aug. 17, 2014.

“I hope she can get through this,” wrote the man who has tried to watch over Big Tina.

Later Saturday, I called the number he left for her. There was no answer.

I would try later, but in the meantime, I went over my memories of Tina Duck.

What stood out was the first time I saw Big Tina. It was at her daughter’s funeral. She was standing in the parking lot of the Roman Catholic church on Sagkeeng First Nation, being shunned, shamed and shouted at by a throng of angry mourners. They were angry because Tina Duck had left her daughter when she was just four years old and her other daughter was even younger. She Abandoned her kids, in the family’s view, to be raised by Tina’s father Eugene, and the woman who would become like a mother to Little Tina — her great aunt Thelma Favel. Angry, also, because after Tina Fontaine’s father was murdered in 2011, it was her mother whom the lost and hurting girl would later run to the city to find. As she briefly and unhappily would. Only to run again, this time into the arms of a killer.

Big Tina was 12 when she met Eugene, who was 24. And 14 when she had her first child. Little Tina would follow, then Sarah, who is now 15. And pregnant.

It was 1:46 p.m. Winnipeg time Saturday when I finally reached Big Tina at the downtown Winnipeg hotel where she rents a room; the same hotel where her sister Nancy Green was living when she died of natural causes last summer — if drinking oneself to death can be classified as natural.

I asked Big Tina if she felt better now that police have made an arrest.

“Yeah. But, like, how does that happen?… How did they find him? Where is this guy, anyway?”

I offered as much as I knew about Cormier, telling her where he had been arrested.

“When is he coming here?” Tina asked. “Because I would like to see him. I would like to ask him why… It just bugs me. I’m glad they found him.”

A court of law hasn’t convicted Cormier, but Little Tina’s mother has. She wants Cormier — the habitual criminal one Crown attorney proclaimed was “doing life on the installment plan” — to do life for the rest of his life.

“Because if he doesn’t, I’d be looking for him. Make him feel the pain.

“I wish I could see him,” she repeated. “And make him feel the pain.”

She was weeping now.

“Sober and sobbing,” as I would later text my man from the Mount Royal.

I couldn’t bring myself to tell her she might already have seen Cormier without knowing it. As her friend had suggested in his text to me on Saturday.

“The picture of the accused,” he wrote, “looks familiar from the Mount Royal. He may have been one of the boosters that passed through the bar.”

I could still hear her weeping.

“I’m so sorry,” I tried to tell her.

But before I could finish, Big Tina was gone.

Late Saturday night, my cell would ring, and her name would appear. It was a pocket call, but by the time I had figured that out, I had overheard the voice of a man who sounded as if he was trying to touch her. And her voice angrily telling him to leave her alone.

It sounded like an echo from the day her daughter died. Later, something else echoed for me from Friday’s police news conference. The words of Sgt. John O’Donovan, the lead investigator on the Tina Fontaine case.

“She was a very confused kid, looking for something she couldn’t find. Looking for her dad, who’s definitely gone.”

And, if I may suggest, looking for her mother.

Whom she did find.

But who wasn’t there, either.

How could she be, though? Big Tina is still a little Tina, herself.

gordon.sinclair@freepress.mb.ca