’He always was smiling when he was sleeping’
Mother of baby Nikosis shares journey of tragedy to healing after violent death
Alyssa Bird remembers her infant son, Nikosis Jace Cantre, as a happy baby who cooed as if he were trying to speak.
“He always was smiling when he was sleeping, and that girl took all that away from him and our family,” she said.
Nikosis was just six weeks old when he was violently beaten to death in a Saskatoon home on July 3, 2016 by Jacqueline Henderson, then aged 16. A member of Bird’s family had taken the teen into the house, believing she was homeless, Bird said. Henderson had escaped a youth detention centre’s custody and had been wandering downtown.
Nikosis would have turned four years old on May 18. Bird and her family are still grieving, but she decided now is the right time to speak publicly.
By phone from her home on George Gordon First Nation, she said most days she feels okay, but she’s lonesome for her son.
The young family had previously lived on George Gordon, including the first few weeks of Nikosis’s life, and were in the process of moving to Saskatoon to live with Bird’s sister when he died.
Bird remembers that she had been outside smoking and went inside to see the girl leave her bedroom and run down the stairs.
When she went into the bedroom, she saw Nikosis gasping for air, covered up with a blanket. She found him naked, badly bruised and scratched, she said.
Bird took her son out of the crib and ran to her sister’s bedroom,
Bird plans to tell them what happened to their brother when they’re older, but they ‘know their brother is in heaven’
holding him in her arms. She woke her sister up, yelling “Look at what she did to my baby,” she said. She saw Nikosis was bleeding from his mouth.
Her sister woke up her boyfriend and told him to run downstairs to catch the girl.
Bird remembers standing in shock on the corner outside the house, while her sister’s boyfriend shouted at her to to go across the street to her aunt’s house and wait for first responders to arrive.
She remembers hearing her sister and aunt on the phone with the operator while her aunt performed CPR on Nikosis.
He died of his injuries in hospital.
Nikosis’s death reverberated in the community, moving others to pay their respects to the infant and his family in a vigil. The George Gordon community held fundraisers for the family. To the public, he was known as “baby Nikosis.”
Although Henderson’s name was subject to a publication ban under the Youth Criminal Justice Act during the two-year court process, the ban was lifted after she was sentenced as an adult. She received the maximum for a youth sentenced as an adult — a life term with no parole eligibility for the first seven years.
The court heard that Henderson said she took all of her anger out on Nikosis, who she didn’t know, but had heard crying in another room.
After the incident, Bird said her sister Larissa tried to call their mother, Charlene Longman, who was out of the province with her husband at a powwow. Her ringer was off, so Larissa kept trying to call until she got through.
When Longman answered, Larissa told her Nikosis had been killed. Longman and her husband immediately began the 12-hour drive home.
Longman said she was in shock herself, but she and her husband drove almost non-stop to get to their family.
It’s still hard to talk about, Longman said.
Bird said the support of her family helped her get through the court process. She attended a weekly grief counselling program on the First Nation for three months, and attended other counselling for a while.
In a way, Bird said she and her mother feel their family received justice with Henderson receiving a life sentence, but they would have preferred a life term without parole.
Henderson, who was sentenced in 2018, is only a few years away from her first opportunity to apply for parole. Bird said she prays Henderson isn’t released from custody.
Bird left Saskatoon after Nikosis died. Her two older children — Amelia, now six, and Lorenzo, now five — remember their brother through photos. Bird said she plans to tell them what happened to their brother when they’re older, but they “know that their brother is in heaven.”
Longman said she wants others to know that her grandson was a very happy baby. Before Bird’s young family went to Saskatoon, Longman and her husband would go into Bird’s room when she was sleeping and would bring Nikosis to their room to hold him, change him and feed him almost every morning.
“When we feel lonesome for Nikosis, we’re all there to support each other,” Longman said.
On May 7, Bird welcomed a new son, Jace, who bears Nikosis’s middle name. She proudly notes the similarities between Jace and Nikosis, from their near identical birth weights — Jace was born an ounce heavier — and their facial features. However, Jace was born with four teeth.
On Facebook, a friend commenting on a photo of Jace said their grandmother told them that when a baby is born with teeth it means someone has come back to live their life through another’s eyes.
“I really believe my son Jace is a two-in-one baby,” Bird said. “Like he has Nikosis’s soul with him.”