Inuk woman who was missing says system failed
The Inuk woman who was reported missing by Montreal police last week says the system failed her.
Police called on Montrealers last Thursday to help them find Mina Aculiak — saying she’d last been seen leaving a police station in StLaurent on July 27.
Aculiak, 48, was airlifted from a village on the Hudson Bay to Montreal last spring for emergency surgery.
She’s been recovering from her injuries ever since and police say she had expressed suicidal thoughts before she went missing.
A worker at one of the health centres Aculiak frequented filed a missing person’s report on July 29. Police took the case public on Aug. 2, four days later, sending a wave of panic through the city ’s tight-knit community of Indigenous street workers.
Given her state of mind, the nature of her injuries and the fact that she speaks almost no English or French, many feared the worst. In the end, an off-duty police officer found her on Crémazie Blvd. last Thursday.
But sources close to the missing person’s case are challenging the official version of events. They say Aculiak spent time in two Montreal detention centres after being released by police on July 27.
In other words, they say, police had found and released her twice after their last reported contact with Aculiak.
“There may have been a major communication problem,” said one police source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The only way this is possible is if someone didn’t enter the right information into the system.”
Speaking through a translator during two separate interviews with the Montreal Gazette Tuesday, Aculiak insisted she’d been detained three times between July 27 and Aug. 2.
Montreal police Insp. André Durocher says it’s “nearly impossible” that Aculiak would have slipped through the system.
“It’s possible she had contact with police, but I’d be extremely surprised if she was actually in a detention centre after she was reported missing,” Durocher said. “We would have had to enter her name in the system and it would have flagged her as missing. Her name isn’t Jean Tremblay, it’s unique enough that they would have found her.”
Aculiak says she can’t remember the exact timeline of her arrests or where the stations were, since she rarely comes to the city. But another source close to the case confirms her account of the arrests.
The 48-year-old was recovering from surgery at the GingrasLindsay rehabilitation centre in Côte-des-Neiges when she was first detained on July 27.
Durocher says she left the centre, got drunk and was disruptive when she returned.
Staff at the rehabilitation centre called police and she was taken to a station in St-Laurent at 6 p.m. When she was released around midnight, Aculiak still had a catheter in her arm, a sling around her elbow and a hospital bracelet tied to her wrist.
Aculiak has rarely been to Montreal and suffers from mental health problems, according to her friends. Police gave her a bus ticket and left Aculiak to navigate the industrial part of St-Laurent on her own.
The decision by officers to release a vulnerable, ailing woman into an unfamiliar city after midnight earned police a rebuke from Mayor Valérie Plante, who called their actions “unacceptable.”
“This was a monumental screwup,” said Nakuset, executive director of the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal. “She could have died on the streets.”
After Aculiak was reported missing Sunday, the Montreal police reached out to the Native Women’s Shelter as part of a new protocol to track missing and murdered Indigenous women. Nakuset says Inuit women new to the city are frequently preyed upon by pimps and drug dealers.
“We have a system in place to make sure our women are safe,” Nakuset said. “But that system only works if police are communicating with each other. It doesn’t look like there was much communication here.”
Aculiak was airlifted to Montreal last April, after she’d been hit by a police truck in the Inuit village of Umiujaq.
The collision fractured six vertebrae, her left arm, her ribs and lacerated her liver and kidney.
Patients who come to Montreal from Quebec’s 14 remote Inuit villages stay at the Ullivik health centre in Dorval. Many, like Acu- liak, are airlifted into the city for emergency surgeries and need a place to stay while they recover.
Cmdr. Marc-André Dorion, of Station 5, says police co-operation with Ullivik has made Dorval a safer place.
When officers see a vulnerable Inuit person in Dorval at night, they’re instructed to drive them back to Ullivik. Even when patients of the health centre are intoxicated, they’re brought back to the centre where they can sober up in a secure, isolated room.
In the wake of Aculiak’s disappearance, Maggie Putulik, the director of Ullivik, says she’s going to start working with other stations in Montreal to develop better practices when dealing with Inuit people.
Aculiak, who is staying with her family in Inukjuak, says she harbours no ill will toward the police.
“I’m doing fine,” she said, in a telephone interview.
“It’s good to be back home.”