Shingoose family, friends get day in court

WINNIPEG — Surrounded by loved ones in a Winnipeg court Friday, the father of a slain First Nation woman spoke of the pain of his loss and the desperation it caused, his voice taut with sadness and anger.

The Manitoba’s Court of King’s Bench held an unusual hearing Friday to hear from the family and community of Ashlee Christine Shingoose, a year after Jeremy Skibicki was sentenced to life with no chance of parole for 25 years for killing her and three other First Nations women in 2022.

“It’s been a tough, tough year for us family … The court failed me,” her father, Albert Shingoose, told King’s Bench Chief Justice Glenn Joyal, in a voice that boomed through the room, distraught over the fact his daughter’s killer did not appear at the hearing.

“If he was here, your honour, I would have said to him, ‘I want an eye for an eye.’”

Shingoose, a 30-year-old from St. Theresa Point First Nation, was identified after the trial as one of Skibicki’s victims. She is believed to have been killed in March 2022.

During the trial and sentencing last year, Shingoose, whose remains had yet to be identified, was referred to as Mashkode Bizhiki’ikwe, or Buffalo Woman, a name given by Indigenous elders.

“It’s so painful, what has happened,” Shingoose’s mother Theresa Shingoose told court, her voice halting and quiet. She said it was healing when police, this week, gave the family the jacket her daughter was last seen wearing.

In a written statement, which was read by St. Theresa Point Chief Raymond Flett, Albert Shingoose said he travelled to Winnipeg from the family’s home in St. Theresa Point after his daughter disappeared, spending months searching for her.

“We knew something terrible had happened. We felt it in our hearts,” Flett read.

“We felt like we were left to search on our own.”

Albert Shingoose long believed his daughter was Skibicki’s unidentified victim, but said no one would listen.

“For the longest time, Ashlee remained unidentified, while we were out here, screaming into silence,” Flett read.

The chief also read out a statement on behalf of the community.

“Her death has broken our hearts and shaken our community,” said Flett.

“To the person responsible, you took Ashlee from us. But you’ll never take away her spirit. We will speak her name, we will remember her love, we will keep her memory alive. You have brought darkness, but her light will continue to shine in our hearts forever.”

As Shingoose had yet to be identified, her family and friends did not get the chance to provide statements to the court at Skibicki’s sentencing, as the families of Rebecca Contois, 24, Morgan Harris, 39, and Marcedes Myran, 26, did.

Winnipeg police homicide detectives used DNA, in conjunction with Skibicki identifying a photos of Shingoose as his first victim after his sentencing, to confirm who Buffalo Woman was.

After she was publicly identified in March, Crown prosecutors raised the idea of the special sitting to put the family and community’s victim impact statements on the court record, to which Joyal agreed.

Shingoose’s body has not yet been found, but a preliminary search began at the Brady Road landfill, where police believe the remains of Shingoose were taken, Premier Wab Kinew said earlier this week.

Skibicki, who’s in his late 30s, targeted women at homeless shelters and disposed of their bodies in garbage bins. He admitted the killings to homicide detectives, after the partial remains of Contois were discovered by a passerby in a bin in May 2022.

He gave police the name of an individual he thought was Buffalo Woman, but she turned out to be alive, and the unidentified woman’s name remained unknown.

The rest of Contois’s remains were found at Brady landfill in 2022, while the remains of Harris and Myran were recovered earlier this year at the Prairie Green landfill, north of the city.

Addressing the packed courtroom before the proceedings began, Joyal said the court had no jurisdiction to order or insist the serial killer attend.

Among those in the gallery were family members of Skibicki’s other victims and their supporters, as well as senior Winnipeg police officials.

Lawyer Peter Kingsley, who’s the executive director of Legal Aid Manitoba, appeared as the killer’s counsel at the hearing. He said Skibicki did not attend out of a “firm belief” his presence would further harm his victims’ loved ones.

Joyal said holding the hearing, which had “no or little precedent,” was appropriate and necessary in the exceptional circumstances of the case, to give Shingoose’s family and community “some measure of comfort.”

Joyal also said the special hearing served as an opportunity for reconciliation between the justice system and Indigenous people, in a case that has been emblematic of the crisis of missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls in Manitoba and across Canada.

“This hearing presents this court with an opportunity to try to respond to one of the inherent challenges at the heart of this crisis — that so many Indigenous women and girls are both murdered and missing, that they simply disappear, leaving behind broken families and devastated communities,” said Joyal.

“This reality beseeches us — where circumstances allow — to make special efforts, to use the tools available to the courts, to honour and commemorate identity, to acknowledge personhood.”

» Winnipeg Free Press