After supporting other families, 2 MMIWG staffers get their chance to speak
Melodie Casella and Gertie Pierre will testify about losing their family member, Cheryl Ann Joe
For months Gertie Pierre and Melodie Casella have been travelling across Canada supporting the families testifying at the national inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls.
But this week the mother and daughter will get the chance to speak about their own loss, and how an act of extreme violence has shaped their lives.
It was the most horrible thing that ever happened.- Gertie Pierre
"It was the most horrible thing that ever happened," says Pierre, who will be testifying Saturday at the hearings in Vancouver. "We didn't have anybody there to comfort us except for one another, and we were falling apart."
More than two decades later, their traumatic experience helped lay the groundwork for the MMIWG, where Pierre and Casella are now putting their degrees in social work to use. Casella works as a health manager, while Pierre is a case support worker who deals directly with families.
"I can relate to them," says Pierre.
"It's not the same as what I went through but I can support them as much as I can."
Grisly discovery
Pierre's niece, 26-year-old Cheryl Ann Joe, was murdered on January 20, 1992. The Coast Salish woman's body was dumped behind a warehouse loading dock in East Vancouver after she had been brutally beaten and sexually mutilated.
Before the family was notified, video of the crime scene was broadcast on the news. Pierre remembers watching it from her home in Sechelt, B.C., and seeing a body covered in a yellow tarp.
"Her feet were sticking out and I said to my husband, 'That looks like Cheryl,' because she had flat feet like me."
The family's worst fears were confirmed hours later in a phone call with the Vancouver police.
Detectives had a suspect in custody within hours of Joe's body being found and charged 36-year-old Brian Allender with first-degree murder.
"From that day it was just an ongoing nightmare," says Casella, who is one of Joe's younger cousins. "It paved a really ugly road for us as a family."
Joe, a mother of three sons, had been working as a prostitute that night when Allender picked her up. She'd been struggling with drinking and had been bouncing back and forth between Sechelt First Nation and Vancouver.
Her family says she was working in the sex trade because she was trying to earn money to go visit two of her children who were living in Alberta with their father.
The family sat through the murder trial listening to the gruesome evidence, including testimony from a forensic psychiatrist who believed that Allender's repeated reviewing of the movie The Silence of the Lambs was a factor in the crime.
Justice Thomas Braidwood, who presided over the case, called the evidence the "most appalling" he had ever heard in his 35 years of practicing law.
Allender was convicted by a jury of first-degree murder and sentenced in 1993 to life in prison.
Recommendations for the inquiry
When the MMIWG was being formed, Pierre family members were part of the initial meetings with provincial, territorial and federal ministers, and they took part in the second national roundtable on the inquiry in Winnipeg in February 2016.
Now it'll be their turn to speak. When Casella and Pierre testify on Saturday, they plan to list off a series of recommendations to the four commissioners. One area they will focus on is the challenges families face in navigating the justice system. Specifically, they believe it should be easier for families to participate in an offender's parole hearings.
"Justice just doesn't happen with a conviction," Casella says. "It has to be followed, and then it's still a fight for continued justice."
She says the family travelled four hours in treacherous winter conditions in December 2016 in order to speak against Allender's parole application.
Parole Board documents detail the family's description of "the deterioration of their lives to nightmares, substance abuse and therapy to deal with their emotions around losing their family member in such a brutal way."
They were outraged when they found out the parole board had originally granted Allender an "elder-assisted" hearing, so that an Indigenous elder would come in and support him — a Caucasian man — during the process. The board ended up quashing that after the family spoke up, and his parole application was ultimately denied.
He remains in custody at a medium-security facility in Agassiz, B.C., but the family is furious that he has been allowed out in the community on work release.
Memorial march
When Pierre and other members of her family arrived in Vancouver this week ahead of the hearings, one of their first stops was the parking lot where Joe's body was found.
They held hands and said a prayer.
"It never gets any easier." Casella says.
In the years since Joe's death, her relatives have leaned on other grieving families for support.
Back in 1992, a few dozen people gathered on Valentine's Day in the same parking lot for what would become an annual march.
It began as a memorial for Joe, but it has become a walk to remember all missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls. Now thousands gather each year and walk through Vancouver's Downtown Eastside, and similar marches are held on February 14 in cities across Canada.
"Something beautiful has come from the loss of our loved one," Casella says.
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