The families of two Indigenous women and an Indigenous teen girl who were found dead in Metro Vancouver are calling for a coroner’s inquest into their deaths.
The families of Tatyanna Harrison, 20, Chelsea Poorman, 24, and Noelle O’Soup, 13, and the group Justice for Girls chose Red Dress Day, which honours missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls, to press the issue.
Harrison was found dead aboard an abandoned yacht in Richmond in August 2022. Poorman was found in a vacant mansion on Vancouver’s west side in May of the same year. O’Soup was found in a Downtown Eastside apartment, also in May 2022, after being overlooked by investigators who had visited the unit several times.
The families of each have long argued that their cases were mishandled and deprioritized by police.
“From the beginning of the investigations, the families were left to search for the missing girls on their own, to investigate their cases, to bring leads to investigators and hope they would be followed,” Justice for Girls staff lawyer Sue Brown said.
“Their families’ search for answers did not end when their deaths were deemed not criminal or not suspicious.”
In 2022, the B.C. Coroners Service said Harrison died of sepsis. Harrison’s family subsequently retained a licensed forensic pathologist to conduct an independent review of her file, which disagreed with that conclusion.
Her family said it also had to advocate for a rape kit to be performed on Harrison, samples which still have not been processed.
“There have been no answers for three years. If you were to help somebody hide a crime that would be a crime itself, so I don’t know what happens when our justice system does it,” her mother Natasha Harrison said.
“Everything they did in Tatyana’s case is exactly what you would have needed to do to fail her.”
Poorman and O’Soup’s causes of death have not been determined.
Poorman’s mother, Sheila Poorman, said she’s still been unable to get answers to many questions about Chelsea’s case, including how or why she made it to the abandoned home.
“Chelsea was a person who wouldn’t hurt anyone,” she said.
“She’d rather give whatever she had to help somebody, she would go out of her way to help a person in need, even though she didn’t have the resources herself.”
O’Soup’s aunt Josie August said the young teen was “failed at every level by this country, by this government, by child welfare, by the Vancouver police by the RCMP” after running away from her group home.
“We’ve found more out from the media than from Vancouver police, from the (Ministry of Children and Family Development), and this has caused great harm to the family, where we no longer can watch the news,” she said.
“Her family in Saskatchewan found out she was discovered through social media, through the news.”
Brown said the way the three cases were handled exactly mirrors the systemic failures to protect Indigenous women and girls highlighted by Canada’s national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls — an exercise that produced many recommendations and little real action.
Holding an inquest, she said, is an opportunity for the province to right an “egregious historical wrong.”
“It’s an opportunity for the coroner’s office to regain public trust and bring much-needed answers as to what happened to Tatyanna, Noelle and Chelsea,” she said.
Global News is seeking comment from Public Safety Minister Gary Begg.