A 48-year-old Inuk woman who went missing after Montreal police left her with a bus ticket and a catheter still in her arm was found Thursday.
An off-duty officer spotted Mina Iquasiak Aculiak walking near Cremazie Boulevard and Bloomfield Avenue in Montreal, several kilometres from the rehabilitation facility she was told to return to.
Aculiak is from a small, northern village off the east coast of Hudson Bay. According to APTN, she was first brought to Montreal for medical treatment after she was struck by a police cruiser and suffered broken limbs, fractured vertebrae, a punctured lung and lacerated kidney and liver.
She was recovering at Montreal’s Gingras-Lindsay Rehabilitation Institute when staff members allege she became intoxicated. They called the police, saying they were concerned for her safety.
Aculiak was brought to a police station with a catheter still in her arm and released around midnight with a bus ticket in hand. Though Aculiak speaks neither English or French, she was instructed to go back to the rehab centre. She was not found for nearly a week.
The incident has infuriated members of the Indigenous community, including the director of the Native Women's Shelter in Montreal, Nakuset.
“If you see a woman that literally has a catheter in her arm and think that the best place for her is the city street (with) a bus ticket, that’s a problem,” Nakuset told CTV Montreal, suggesting the police need empathy training. “I don’t understand how they could do such a thing… We would have taken her in a second. They don’t notify us.”
Montreal Mayor Valerie Plante said the case provides an opportunity for the police to address their procedures in cases like Aculiak’s.
“I think it’s a good opportunity for them to question or revise some of the procedures around some of those cases,” she told reporters.
The police are looking into the incident and whether or not proper protocol was followed, though they said it’s too soon to say if there were mistakes made.
“If something was improper, of course we’re going to correct it,” Police Inspector André Durocher.
With a report from CTV Montreal
