Toronto case shows search possible

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 19/07/2023 (829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It’s a debate that isn’t getting any easier.

And it also isn’t going to go away, no matter how much the provincial government might want it to.

On Monday, a group of specialists from a committee asked to examine the feasibility of locating the bodies of two women believed to have been buried in the Prairie Green landfill held a news conference where they reiterated that the search is possible.

“Our collective opinion is that this search can be done,” Sean Sparling, CEO of Investigative Solutions Network Maskwa, a private firm based in Ontario, told the news conference via video link. “It can be done safely, with no more risk than (to) workers that are out there today doing the very same type of work. It has a good possibility for success. We’ve done it in the past, and it worked.”

Premier Heather Stefanson’s response to the Monday news conference — having a spokesperson essentially repeat, verbatim, the reasons she gave in a written statement July 5 for not proceeding with a search — will do nothing to move things forward.

But as the issue moves ahead without the government, it’s also worth looking back.

The report of the committee examining the possible landfill search points out it’s not the entire Prairie Green landfill that would be searched.

Using information supplied by the Winnipeg Police, the report points out that the bodies of Morgan Harris and Marcedes Myron were believed to have been dumped in the same dumpster in the 1300 block of Henderson Highway — Harris on May 3, 2022, and Myron on May 10.

The report also details that dumpster was emptied by a Green for Life truck on May 16 at 6:38 a.m., and then taken to the Prairie Green site, where the truck was emptied in an area known as cells 15/13.

On June 20, 2022, the WPS visited the landfill site, and Prairie Green halted all dumping in those two cells. It has stayed that way since then, meaning the area in question holds waste for 34 days after it was believed the bodies were dumped, and for roughly 45 days before that: cells 13 and 15 only started to be used at the beginning of April, 2022. (As the subcommittee points out, while the Prairie Green landfill does not track truck unloading by GPS, the company has “stringent record keeping” for use of the site.)

In total, if all the material needed to be searched (the subcommittee points out that analyzing dated material such as newspapers or correspondence may help narrow the search), it would amount to 61,200 tonnes, or 7,200 dump truck loads. That’s still a lot of material.

There are also significant costs and timelines involved in building a facility that can safely handle that amount of material, and the risks involved with the fact that the material to be searched was used to cover bagged asbestos waste — along with the dangers of gases given off by decomposing dump material.

That being said, successful searches can be done, and have been done.

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The worst case is that, despite the expenditure of time and money, nothing is found.

The best case is that the search takes far less time, because of the information that’s already known about where waste was dumped on May 16, 2022.

And it’s worth keeping in mind the case of Nathaniel Brettell and the Green Lane Landfill.

Green Lane is Toronto’s main waste management site — police believed Brettell had been murdered, and that his body had ended up in the landfill. The resulting search took roughly three months: police credit the waste site’s records of when and where waste came from for narrowing down the hunt.

Worth thinking about.