SEEKING TRUTH IN A TIME OF CRISIS
Grieving father trusted us to set the record straight after his young son’s tragic death
The goal of the Saskatoon StarPhoenix was to get it right.
That was what I told Hussein Elmmi a day after his five-yearold son, Ahmedsadiq Elmmi, drowned in a pond near Dundonald School. When I sat down with Hussein, the boy’s funeral had been held just a few hours earlier at the Islamic Association of Saskatchewan Mosque on Copland Crescent.
Like any father in his situation, he was crushed. Listening to the tape of our interview three months later, I heard his quiet voice again, speaking about his family’s unfathomable loss.
Support was pouring in for them. People all over Saskatoon were heartbroken over the accident, but no one more than Hussein and his loved ones.
In our interview, he said there was no adjective to describe how the death affected his family.
Their life would never be the same, and his frustration and anger were magnified by the misinformation circulating about his boy.
The hours after a tragedy are chaotic. Some reports said Ahmedsadiq was a newcomer to Canada, but as The StarPhoenix gathered more information, it became clear that wasn’t the case.
Hussein had questions about where the information was coming from. He felt people were stereotyping his son.
While the family was new to Saskatoon, his wife had been living in Prince Albert since 2000 and Ahmedsadiq was a Canadian citizen, born in Prince Albert’s Victoria Hospital.
Gathering information about a person who has died is always a challenge, and never enjoyable. It’s even more difficult when the person is a child.
Various people told reporters the boy’s family was a member of three different communities in Saskatoon: the Filipino community, the Pakistani community and the Somali community.
We started to reach out to community associations on Facebook in an attempt to get more information.
That’s when a representative from the Pakistani community told me the child was a member of the Somali community and his funeral was taking place as we messaged back and forth.
After speaking with my editors, we decided I should stop by the funeral to seek more information from people who knew the family directly, or to see if we could speak with the boy’s parents.
It was a delicate situation, to say the least. In looking for answers, we had to be respectful.
By the time I arrived, the funeral had ended and the small casket carrying Ahmedsadiq’s body was being loaded into the back of a hearse. There was no opportunity to speak with anyone extensively, as family had already moved on to the burial site. However, a trusted contact agreed to try to get a message to the family that the paper was hoping to speak with them.
An hour or so later, the contact called, and after some brief conversations, we were told the boy’s father was willing to speak with me directly. We were going to hear more about the boy from the man who raised him.
Meanwhile, people across the city were also looking for answers. Information about the death — accurate or not — was spreading.
More than 480 students attend the school, and few people knew the identity of the child who had drowned.
Was it a relative, the child of a friend or an acquaintance?
When such questions are swirling around, journalists are under pressure to find the truth.
Without help from the people directly involved, carrying out that task borders on impossible.
Frustrated by the misinformation spreading on the social media rumour mill, Hussein and his family wanted people to know the facts about Ahmedsadiq.
At a time of unimaginable stress, they chose to trust the StarPhoenix, and nothing mattered more to us than living up to that responsibility.
Ahmedsadiq’s death is still under investigation by the Saskatoon Public School Division and Saskatchewan’s Advocate for Children and Youth.