‘A very lonely path’
Amid grief, mother of stabbing victim embraces safety efforts
The stabbing death of her daughter on a Beltline street by a man she allegedly didn’t know has left Erika Ladouceur looking over her own shoulder.
“I feel footsteps behind me and my heart just stops — I whip around with keys in my hands because that’s what happened to her,” said Ladouceur. “But police have said she didn’t have a chance because she was attacked from behind.”
That fear has been present for nearly two years, since her 30-year-old daughter Vanessa Ladouceur was attacked by a knife-wielding man on March 18, 2022, in the 100 block of 10 Ave. S.E. at 6:40 a.m. while she was on her way to work at a fitness centre.
She was a half block from her workplace when she died, a security guard holding her hand, says her family.
Her daughter had safety concerns and even avoided an underpass on her way to the fitness facility, said Ladouceur.
“She went a different route, thinking that was safer, but it turns out it wasn’t,” she said. “Vanessa was preparing for an Ironman (competition) ... she was training with a boxer and was super strong but not strong enough.”
Ladouceur’s shocking death was a catalyst for a series of initiatives to make the city’s downtown core a safer, more welcoming place.
Erika Ladouceur said she’s felt the seismic shock of her daughter’s death, beyond her own family.
“A lot of strangers have said it changed their lives,” she said.
On Wednesday, a task force tabled its report at city hall following six months of consultations with 40 downtown business, social agency and community members on making the city’s core a more inviting, safer destination.
Among the 28 recommendations of the Downtown Safety Leadership Table are more efforts to address the root causes of crime and social disruption, keeping the downtown in better repair, establishing a police station in the city’s core and closing parts of the Plus-15 networks it says have become magnets for crime.
That comes as the city invests $1.9 million to enhance security around downtown facilities near the LRT corridor along with a beefing up of the police and Calgary Transit officer presence.
Task force co-chair Mark Garner said there are signs of a growing confidence among those who frequent the downtown.
“But we can’t take our feet off the gas pedal,” said Garner, executive director of the Calgary Downtown Association.
“The downtown represents our brand, it’s a postcard alongside the mountains.”
Ladouceur said she embraces all of the efforts to enhance downtown safety, pointing to an element immediately tangible to pedestrians and transit users — HELP buttons — and surveillance cameras.
“I think it’s wonderful that there’s a task force and anything you can do to make things safer — more police and security officers — is a good thing,” she said. “It’s heartbreaking, all of the violence and senseless killings, especially when you know what it feels like, as mother.”
But in the meantime, Ladouceur grapples with the reality of having joined a select and unhappy cohort — parents who have lost their children to violence.
“It’s different if your child has committed suicide or if they’ve had a long-term illness — if your child is murdered, you really need a specific group,” she said.
Part of that support has come from sharing her burden with family members of five young Calgarians stabbed to death during a house party in Brentwood a decade ago next month — Jordan Segura, Kaitlin Perras, Lawrence Hong, Zackariah Rathwell and Joshua Hunter.
“They’re really helping me prepare for the hearings and what I’ll go through,” said Ladouceur.
But at the same time, being cast into unspeakable tragedy has been isolating — for friends, confronting her family’s grim reality has often been alienating, she said.
“You lose a lot of friends because they don’t understand why you’re always crying ... it’s been a very lonely path because people can’t relate,” said Ladouceur. “All we can really do is hold on as a family.”