Brady Road landfill reopens week after body discovered

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/04/2023 (882 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Brady Road landfill has reopened, one week after staff found the body of an Indigenous woman on site.

The City of Winnipeg tweeted the south end waste disposal site was open Monday morning. It had closed April 3, following the discovery of the body of Linda Mary Beardy, 33, a mother of four from Lake St. Martin First Nation who had been living in the capital.

The Winnipeg Police Service initially described her death as suspicious, but later said area video surveillance footage shows Beardy leaving a Pembina Highway store and climbing into a garbage bin a few hours before her body was discovered.

The video shows her getting into the bin just before 11:15 a.m., but not coming out, police said. A garbage truck picked up the bin shortly after 2 p.m., emptied the contents into the back of the truck, and later dumped its load at the Brady Road landfill.

Homicide investigators were initially on the case, but public tips led police to the store on the 2200 block of Pembina Highway, where Beardy was seen before she died, WPS Chief Danny Smyth said during a news conference last week.

On April 6, Smyth said the cause of death had not yet been established by the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner. He was unable to say if the woman had died before or after the bin’s contents were dumped into the truck.

An autopsy confirmed her injuries were consistent with a bin’s contents being dumped into a truck, the police chief said. “There were no other injuries that suggest any kind of foul play.”

Beardy was among the Lake St. Martin residents displaced due to flooding in 2011, Chief Christopher Traverse said at a news conference outside the landfill following Smyth’s public update.

“Indigenous people are not trash, and normalizing having their bodies found in dumpsters is disgraceful,” Traverse said. “It’s traumatizing for our community.”

The city also closed the landfill for more than two weeks in December and January, after a protest group set up a blockade and camp to call for a search of Brady Road for human remains and more action to prevent violence against Indigenous women and girls.

A rally calling for an end to such violence was also held late last week at the intersection of Portage Avenue and Main Street.

In June 2022, the partial remains of Rebecca Contois, a 24-year-old member of O-Chi-Chak-Ko-Sipi First Nation, were found at the landfill. Police believe Contois and three other Indigenous women were slain by an alleged serial killer.

Investigators believe the remains of Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, were deposited at the privately-owned Prairie Green Landfill north of Winnipeg. Police have not determined the likely location of an unidentified woman known as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe (Buffalo Woman).