Inuit woman’s ordeal outrages community workers
48-year-old was missing nearly a week after being released by St-Laurent police
Nearly a week after leaving a StLaurent police station and just hours after police posted a missing-persons alert, Mina Iquasiak Aculiak has been found.
Montreal police said Aculiak, 48, was found at the corner of Crémazie Blvd. and Bloomfield Ave. by an off-duty officer.
Aculiak speaks neither French nor English, has a severely injured arm and had expressed suicidal thoughts before she disappeared. Community workers contacted by the Montreal Gazette had feared the worst.
Aculiak was recovering from surgery at the Institut de réadaptation Gingras-Lindsay in Côte-desNeigeswhensheleftthecentreon foot last Friday. Police say she was intoxicated when they picked her up and drove her to Station 7 in StLaurent that night.
Six hours later, officers gave her a bus ticket and sent her back into an unfamiliar city. When she left the station, she still had her hospital bracelet on and a catheter in her arm.
Aculiak’s partner, Paul Tookalook, scoured the streets of St-Laurent for days, looking for any sign of her. When he finally heard she’d been found, he couldn’t believe it.
“Only when I finally see her will it be real,” said Tookalook. “I’m very, very happy. I’ll hold her in my arms when I see her.”
Aculiak comes from the northern village of Umiujaq and was airlifted to Montreal for emergency surgery last spring. She’s been recovering ever since, and Tookalook said she doesn’t know her way around the city.
Tookalook, who flew south to visit her last week, said Aculiak seemed fine in the hours before she disappeared.
“I was so angry (with the police),” he said. “I was worried sick.”
The director of an Inuit health centre in Dorval says police didn’t follow protocol in releasing Aculiak.
“I’m disappointed in the way police handled this,” said Maggie Putulik, director of Ullivik, one of the places Aculiak stayed while in Montreal. “The St-Laurent station allowed a vulnerable, ailing woman to leave with just a bus ticket in her hand.
“If this had been handled by the officers at Station 5 in Dorval, we wouldn’t have (had) a missingpersons case on our hands. The outcome would have been much different.”
Most Inuit patients undergoing surgery in Montreal stay at Ullivik, and police in the area have a working relationship with the health centre. Even if a patient is intoxicated in public, Dorval officers pick them up and drive them back to Ullivik, where they can be placed in an isolated room to sober up.
Putulik says officers at the StLaurent station could have contacted Aboriginal liaison officer Carlo De Angelis, or simply driven Aculiak back to the rehabilitation centre themselves.
“I don’t understand the logic behind their decision to just let her go,” said Putulik. “It’s upsetting. It’s very upsetting.”
Police from Station 7 and investigators searched for her while officers across the island had been briefed about her disappearance. The SPVM is also conducting its own investigation to find out whether police mishandled Aculiak’s release.
Street workers at the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal diverted most of their resources to look for Aculiak. Shelters like the Open Door, Red Roof and others that primarily deal with Indigenous clientele assisted in the search.
“We (were) terrified and we’re angry,” said Nakuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. “This is a monumental screw-up by police.”
Montreal Mayor Valérie Plante said Thursday Aculiak’s disappearance was “sad and unacceptable.”
“We need to use this as an opportunity to think about how we do things.”
Putulik said she will work with officers at Station 7 to make sure incidents like this never happen again. Ullivik’s partnership with the Dorval station is considered a model of best practices in the field. It’s being studied by police departments across Canada that might implement similar partnerships.
Aculiak was airlifted to the city on April 4 after being hit by a police truck in her hometown. She had allegedly shoplifted some knives and was running from police when they struck her with their patrol vehicle.
The impact fractured six of her vertebrae, broke her left arm and punctured her lung, kidney and liver. The Bureau des enquêtes indépendantes is investigating whether police acted appropriately in that incident.
Friends say Aculiak suffers from a severe mental health condition and that she’d sought treatment in the past.