Mother seeks answers as son found dead in river
Teen vanished from Montreal’s Osheaga festival
A heartbroken Ottawa mother can’t understand how her only child ended up dead in the St. Lawrence River days after he vanished from a Montreal music festival.
“I miss my boy,” Georgina Mensa Boboe said through tears from a friend’s home in Montreal, where she’d arrived to join the search for her son, Collins Obiagboso.
“Collins wouldn’t go near the water because he doesn’t know how to swim. I wish I was there to help him when he needed help,” the grief-stricken mom said Wednesday.
The École secondaire publique De La Salle student, who’d just turned 18, was visiting his hometown, and last Friday went to the Osheaga music festival with friends — one a classmate, another a cousin visiting from Alberta.
They got separated from Collins in the crowd.
He was reported missing Sunday. The following afternoon, people fishing on the St. Lawrence River spotted a body on the eastern side of Île Ste-Hélène, not far from the festival. There were no signs of violence on the body, said JeanPierre Brabant, spokesperson for the Montreal police.
The coroner’s office will do an autopsy.
“We’ll be able to better understand on our side the cause of the death and the circumstances of the death,” Brabant said.
Boboe is left reeling at the loss of a “lovable boy” who was “kindhearted, gentle” and just wanted others to be happy.
She’d like to bury her son in Montreal, where he was born shortly after her arrival from Nigeria and spent much of his youth and where he died. But Boboe, who works at a local cleaning service after moving to Ottawa from Calgary last year, is facing costly funeral arrangements.
Most of all, she’s desperate for answers. She wonders if police can track Collins’ movements on surveillance cameras. Was he pushed in the water? Was her son, an asthmatic who reportedly wasn’t feeling well at the show, slipped a tainted drink?
“I don’t know what to do. I’d like to know, what happened?”
A Go Fund Me page has been established at https://www.gofundme.com/CollinsObiagboso to help Boboe with the funeral arrangements for her son.