Four days before 15-year-old runaway Tina Fontaine was pulled from the Red River in Winnipeg, she told another youth she wanted to die.
The body of Fontaine was found wrapped in a bag in the Red River in Winnipeg on Aug. 17.
Fontaine had run away from home on the Sagkeeng First Nation in July. When she arrived in Winnipeg, the teenager was placed into the care of the Child and Family Services Agency (CFS), and was given a place to live in a Winnipeg hotel.
The number of children in provincial care in Manitoba has been rising and many of them are aboriginal. The province has increased the number of foster families and decreased the number of hotel spaces, but hasn’t eliminated it.
Many of those placed in hotels are at-risk youth, known runaways and teenaged prostitutes. The children placed in these hotels are not locked up, but are given rules, limitations and curfews. If the rules are not met and they leave, the children are reported as missing persons.
But, CFS couldn’t keep Tina Fontaine from leaving and the teen bolted from their care several times.
A 16-year-old boy who spent time with Fontaine in her final days told CTV News: “(Fontaine) was like, ‘screw this, I’m going to go hurt myself and hopefully, I don’t come back.’
“I told her not to do that. She didn’t do it, but someone did it to her,” the boy recalled of his last conversation with Fontaine four days before she was pulled from the Red River.
“She was like suicidal and whenever she’d feel like that she’d go and do her thing,” said the 16-year-old boy who cannot be named because he’s also under CFS care.
First Nations leaders have been asking for an overhaul of Manitoba’s CFS.
“What are the conditions of a young person’s life where they would feel safer on the street, as opposed to feeling the safety that the CFS system is supposed to provide for them,” asks Derek Nepinak, Grand Chief of the Assembly of First Nations.
Union representatives and social workers say there’s a need for more trained staff. There are also calls to amend legislation to allow children seized by the province to stay with extended families, rather than strangers.
Manitoba’s Child and Family Service made changes in recent years. Some of those changes were a result of 62 recommendations – released in January - to improve the child welfare system from the $14 million inquiry into the 2005 death of a five-year-old girl named Pheonix Victoria Hope Sinclair. It was determined from the inquiry that Manitoba’s child welfare system failed to protect Sinclair, and rendered defenceless against her mother’s cruelty and the sadistic violence of the woman’s boyfriend.
Now, two months after Fontaine was murdered, her case is leading to new questions and potentially new changes.
The provincial government has launched an internal investigation as to how Fontaine’s case was handled.
Earlier this week, it was revealed that on August 8, two Winnipeg police officers saw Fontaine when they spot-checked a car in which she was a passenger.
CTV News was told the man with Fontaine was impaired and was taken away by police, but Fontaine, who was known to police and reported missing, was allowed to leave on her own.
Police Supt. Danny Smyth said he’s investigating whether the police officers acted improperly upon finding a missing person.
“If officers come into contact with a person reported missing, I would expect them to take that person into their care,” Smyth said.
-With files from CTV Winnipeg’s Jill Macyshon and The Canadian Press
