Nearly 8 years after disappearance, family holds vigil for missing woman

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This article was published 24/01/2016 (3839 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Every year for the last three years, Bernadette Smith and her family have put up posters on Selkirk Avenue at King Street for her 21-year-old sister, Claudette Osborne-Tyo, who has been missing since 2008.

The family believes seeing Osborne-Tyo’s face every day is making someone remember her.

Now they just need that someone — whether it be someone with a guilty conscience or someone who may have just heard something — to step up with information on where Osborne-Tyo is or what happened to her.

“For the last three years, we’ve been putting up posters on this tree and that tree and every year, they get taken down. We’re hoping they don’t get taken down this year,” Smith said.

“We think somebody is taking them down because they have to see that every day. Seven-and-a-half years without knowing is a long time. Her kids are growing up without her. My stepmom has not had her daughter home. A piece of our heart is missing, a piece of our family. We want someone to come forward with information.”

On Sunday night, about 30 people, including Smith, Osborne-Tyo’s mother Brenda Osborne, one of Osborne-Tyo’s children and her fiancé, Matt Bushby, gathered at Selkirk and King on the snow-covered sidewalk and boulevard for a candlelight vigil.

It’s the last place Osborne-Tyo, the mother of four children — Dayton, Layla, Iziah and Patience — was heard from before she disappeared on July 24, 2008. Police traced her phone card and found it had been used at a pay phone at the Selkirk and King location. The pay phone, which is no longer there, was outside a building that used to be a bingo hall but is now a church.

“Today, it’s seven-and-a-half years since my sister Claudette went missing and we didn’t know for at least two years that this is the last known place that she was,” said Smith. “We know she made phone calls all the way from the Lincoln Motor Hotel (now called the Four Crowns Inn) all the way down Selkirk at most of the pay phones. We want people to know that we know that she was last here. We know that people know something. Nobody goes and just disappears without anybody knowing something.”

Five people drummed and sang a traditional honour song. Smith, Nahanni Fontaine, Manitoba’s special advisor on aboriginal women’s issues, Althea Guiboche, the provincial Liberal candidate for Point Douglas, and Bushby each spoke passionately about missing and murdered indigenous women and Osborne-Tyo.

Bushby, the father of Osborne-Tyo’s daughter Patience and son Iziah, made an emotional plea for anyone with information to come forward.

“If somehow, we could get the people who know what’s going on with the missing women and murdered women, to come forward or their friends to come forward, to just relieve us of this horrendous burden of not knowing,” Bushby said, his voice breaking with emotion.

“Our kids need answers. Claudette’s kids, my kids, they need to know what happened to their mom.”

On Osborne-Tyo’s posters, the phone number 1-888-673-3316 appears for Project Devote, a joint task force of officers from the Winnipeg Police Service and the RCMP, RCMP civilian analysts, RCMP data analysts and an RCMP administrative staff member. Formed in 2012, Project Devote is investigating 28 cases of missing or murdered people who were considered at risk before their disappearance.

“On Friday, I got a call from Project Devote, just checking in and letting us know they’re still there, they’re still working on the case. There’s no new news, as all the months before, but at least there’s that communication which wasn’t there years before (Project Devote started),” Bushby said. “It’s been a really long seven-and-a-half years, wondering.”

ashley.prest@freepress.mb.ca