Woman missing in P.A. for four weeks
It’s been four weeks PRINCE ALBERT since Happy Mary Charles was last seen in Prince Albert, and her family is desperately searching for her.
“I feel really worried,” said her daughter, 19-year-old Marcia Bird. “I hope that she can be found alive.”
They’ve checked alleys and riverbanks. They ’ve plastered posters on telephone poles and questioned people all over the city.
Police continue their own investigation.
According to Charles’s stepfather, Carson Poitras, investigators took a DNA sample and sent a canine unit under a viaduct by the train tracks.
“We are pretty much running out of ideas in the city,” Poitras said.
On the weekend, family, friends and volunteers searched a field south of Victoria Hospital for the second time, hoping to find a clue previously covered in snow.
Bird, her 17-year-old sister Ariel Charles, and their grandmother, Regina Poitras, walked together.
“Last weekend, we chose not to bring the daughters,” Carson Poitras said.
“This week, the girls were adamant that they wanted to come out and help. We kind of set a protocol that if someone finds something, you guys got to back off, because we don’t want them to have that as a lasting impressing of their mom.”
At “base camp” inside the Senator Allen Bird Memorial Centre, experienced searcher David Crane helped steer the operation. Crane had travelled to Prince Albert to help find another missing girl — a search that quickly succeeded in finding her safe. He decided to stay in town to support the family of Happy Charles, he said.
Carson said the help has allowed volunteers to cover more ground and given them a “burst of energy.”
“It’s really hard on our family,” he said. “It’s tiring because we are trying to do so much by ourselves — or we were until David came.”
The family last heard from Charles by email, around midnight on April 2. She said she was at the business centre at the Prince Albert Inn.
Family members say she planned to go to detox.
They say she was last seen with her boyfriend, but they haven’t heard from him and don’t know where he might be.
The Prince Albert Inn, the family learned, doesn’t have a business centre. A witness reported seeing Charles less than a week after she went missing. Someone else had a vision of her getting into a truck.
It leaves them feeling overwhelmed.
“I still have a lot of hope, but it’s kind of going away. I’m really trying to stay positive,” Bird said.
“We still pray and hope that we will find her OK and she will call. But we still have to come to the realization that it might be the other side of the coin,” Carson Poitras said.