On Sunday, volunteers travelled to St. Catharines from across the province to help in the search for Katrina Blagdon, the 37-year-old Army veteran who went missing on New Year's Eve. They fanned out across the area surrounding Martindale Pond, and the Henley Course, in hopes of finding any evidence of what might have happened to the mother-of-two. Searchers included other military personnel, as well as friends and family of the well-liked woman who was reported missing on New Year's Day.
The last sighting of Trina was on New Year's Eve around 6 p.m. at a local sub shop. She disappeared without her wallet or her lime green Jeep, and there has been no cell phone activity since that night.
Her family, some of whom have come to St. Catharines from as far as Nova Scotia, are being supported by more than 3,000 members of a Facebook site which has been set up to organize searches and to provide accurate information about her case. She is also being supported by a well organized fundraising drive that includes a Go Fund Me page which has raised more than $8,000 to support the family in their search as well as a raffle for a bucket of booze, even a bath salts fundraiser.
The family is also being provided with home cooked meals and dining gift certificates. One of the chefs is John Simpson whose daughter Ashley Simpson disappeared six years ago in Salmon Arm. Ashley's body was just recently recovered, and her boyfriend has been charged with second degree murder.
Raising money and cooking food is the Simpson family's way of giving back. Both John and his wife Cindy are professional cooks who work on the ships that travel the Great Lakes. They had pledged to help the families of the missing and murdered in Canada, but they did not expect that on the weekend John left to bring his daughter home from B.C., another family's child would go missing right in his own backyard.
"I never met Trina but she seems to be a wonderful woman who gave her time to the country in service in the Armed Forces as I once did," he wrote on her Facebook site. "Her family needs our support and I will always pay this forward as I have gotten my girl back. Not the way we wanted but home is home for us."
Despite these efforts, many who suffer in the Missing and Murdered community continue to be frustrated by the lack of quick action by authorities in cases that do not involve children or the elderly. The mother of Shaelene Bell who went missing from Chilliwack last January is calling for creation of an early alert system that would kick in when people disappear.
According to a petition on Change.org, one of the challenges encountered when a person goes missing is the time it takes to bring awareness of a case into the public spotlight.
"Days can be wasted and critical evidence lost or destroyed in the process," the petition says.
Shaelene's body was located six months after she disappeared. Her family believes quicker action could have resulted in her being found much earlier.
To date, according to Canada's Missing website, approximately 70,000 people were reported as missing across Canada in 2020. Roughly 40,000 were minors; the remaining 30,000 were adults.
Another problem with the system is that unless it can be demonstrated that foul play is a factor in a disappearance, authorities have their hands tied in pursuing an investigation. Thanks to the efforts of families of the missing in Ontario, the Missing Persons Act came into effect in July 1, 2019 which will give police increased resources to investigate missing persons cases.
The act is design to help police who are stonewalled because of privacy regulations that limit their ability to investigate the whereabouts of the victims and whether they had accessed their bank accounts -- even if they have landed in hospitals.
The legislation was prompted by the efforts of Maureen Trask whose son disappeared in 2011. Trask could not even get information about whether her 28-year-old son visited a hospital because she did not have power of attorney.
"Without having that information, it's very difficult to track their movement including things like video, perhaps at places where they were last known to be," Trask told the CBC at the time.
Most of the call for change has come from families who have lost loved ones, such as the Simpson family and others like RL Dakin who volunteers her time setting up social media sites for families who have taken to Facebook and Instragram to ask for help locating their loved ones.
"It wasn't until I had that personal experience that I understood how frightening and heartbreaking the experience of having a missing loved one can be," she said. "It made sense to me that if there was a missing person's group for someone it should be well organized because that would improve the efficiency of any search effort. Instead I was seeing groups where it might be day five or six, and members were still asking where the poster was, and no one was there to answer."
In coming days, another group of volunteers will take on a search using drones to surveil areas where it is difficult for search and rescue personnel to tread. Wings of Mercy was created in response to the plight of the Simpson family and friends who were unable to search the treacherous terrain around Salmon Arm where their daughter Ashley was eventually found.
Today, that Facebook group has more than a 1,000 members who are trained in the use of technology to conduct search and rescue in remote and rural locations. Since the creation of the group, new software has been developed to help pinpoint areas of interest which many searcher may have missed.
One challenge continues to be keeping up the momentum in a search after the initial first few days. Communities don't have the resources to pay for professional searches, and so it is left to the families and friends to continue to comb the bushes and scour the fields.
The biggest challenge remains keeping these cases in the public eye. Media rarely cover them after the first few days, and only express new interest if there is a development such as the location of a body. Fortunately, social media is there to fill in the gap. By joining these missing persons groups, people become invested as they learn more about the missing individuals and their families.
The group Please Bring Ashley Simpson Home continues even now, and is needed more than ever by the Simpson family. Its 1,400 members have supported A GoFundMe campaign that raised nearly $8,000 to help offset the expenses of bringing Ashley home.
The social media groups also offer incredible support, and hope for the families like Katrina's.
"We never give up," John Simpson says. "We will be there for Katrina's family until we find her."
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