Mary-Lou Swanek couldn’t get a hold of her son.

By itself, that wasn’t unusual. But it had been months since anyone else in the family had heard from him, too — so on Feb. 15, 2018, she called the Toronto Police Service to report him missing.

Hours later, according to a notice of claim recently filed against the province, she got a call back — not from police, but from the Special Investigations Unit, Ontario’s civilian-led agency that investigates incidents where people have died or been seriously injured in encounters involving police.

Her son was dead. He had been for nine months. His body was unclaimed. It was sitting frozen in the morgue.

Blair Swanek’s family now says they intend to sue the SIU for failing to notify them of his death. The family alleges the police watchdog was negligent and caused them damage including psychological harm after the 36-year-old’s body sat unclaimed while his next-of-kin were only a Facebook search away.

The family was “distraught” to learn of his death, they say in their notice of claim, “but they were shocked at further learning that he had been kept frozen at a morgue and that nobody had bothered to notify them.”

Members of the SIU “were negligent in their duty and made no reasonable effort to notify next-of-kin,” the notice reads.

In an email sent to Mary-Lou Swanek last month, an SIU manager apologized and said the police watchdog has since made changes to ensure investigators and the coroner’s office will work together to locate next-of-kin in the future.

She received that email on the second anniversary of her son’s death: “The significance of today’s date is not lost on me,” the manager wrote. “I am truly sorry for your loss.”

Still, for Blair Swanek’s family, an apology is not enough.

A notice of claim must be filed in advance of a lawsuit involving the Crown as a defendant; the family’s next step is to file a statement of claim, which will detail the damages they allege. Their claims have not been proven in court.

The Star sent a list of questions to the SIU and the Ministry of the Attorney General, which oversees the SIU and is also named in the notice of claim. An SIU spokesperson said the agency had no comment because the case is headed to court. The ministry did not respond.

The SIU did not respond to a question on whether any other cases exist in which next-of-kin have not been notified of a family member’s death.

According to the SIU report on his death, Blair Swanek died in a fall from his apartment building soon after a pair of Toronto police visits on May 13, 2017.

The officers went to his 15th-floor apartment, on Weston Road near Lawrence Avenue West, in two unsuccessful door knocks to serve a warrant for his arrest for breach of probation. (Swanek’s family does not know why he was on probation and the SIU report does not detail a reason).

The first set of officers knocked and identified themselves at Blair’s door around 6:30 pm on that May evening. There was no response, according to the SIU report, which for privacy reasons does not name anyone, including Blair, the officers or witnesses.

The second pair of officers paid the apartment a visit at 9 p.m. They too knocked, and a voice they thought sounded like a man trying to sound like a woman said through the closed door that Blair was not home, according to the SIU report. Later, while sitting in their cruiser after the door-knock, the officers learned someone had found a body at the base of the building.

They found Swanek by a dumpster, with no vital signs.

Because officers were nearby at the time of his death, Toronto police notified the SIU at 10:55 p.m. that night. At that point, the SIU invoked its mandate and became the lead investigators into Swanek’s death, with the responsibility of locating and notifying his next-of-kin.

Four SIU investigators were assigned, as well as two forensic investigators. During the investigation, they interviewed the four officers, contacted three civilian witnesses, and retrieved CCTV footage.

Swanek had last been in touch with family around a month earlier at Easter, when he sent a card to an aunt, saying he was doing well.

Long periods between contact weren’t unusual — Swanek had had a difficult life that included time in jail, maybe he was back inside, his family thought. (In a Facebook post, Swanek wrote about spending spend eight months in jail, saying it was a “terrible experience” in a system that makes people “dependent” and sets them up to re-offend on release.)

As a child, Swanek won public speaking awards in school. He “was loved unconditionally” by many relatives, “and he loved back,” Mary-Lou Swanek, who lives in Nanaimo, wrote in email exchanges with the Star.

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Her son, she said, was “highly intelligent, and had a passion for religion and history.” Then, in high school, he met up with the wrong crowd, “and so begins his story of living on the wrong side of the track,” she said.

Still, he kept in touch, and he typically turned up every Christmas to be with family.

On Sept. 15, 2017, the SIU cleared the Toronto police officers of any wrongdoing in Blair Swanek’s death, finding it was “was caused by his own actions without any direct involvement by the officers present” and that “the fall or jump ... was completely unforeseeable.”

Meanwhile, Swanek’s body sat in the morgue unclaimed, where it would remain for another five months, until his mother’s call to police.

Had the investigators looked at Swanek’s Facebook page, still public to this day, it would have returned six contacts sharing the same last name, including his mother, the family’s notice of claim says.

In addition, the family claims, information about next-of-kin was “readily and easily” available through other agencies, including police and the Office of the Chief Coroner.

Asked about the Swanek case, Dirk Huyer, Ontario’s Chief Coroner, would not speak to specifics but told the Star his office started taking steps in March 2017 to standardize attempts to find next of kin for identified, unclaimed bodies.

“We always, always had a process,” he said. “But what we did is, we looked at the process much more carefully ... so that we have an expected pathway that occurs for everybody who’s unclaimed to make reasonable steps to identify next-of-kin.”

Regular meetings are now held to go over the files of unclaimed bodies there for more than a couple weeks, Huyer said.

“We now have an oversight monitoring role centrally to ensure that if somebody is there for that period of time, there’s questions to the coroner, and there’s questions to the police, and then in an SIU case, there would be some questions to the SIU to say, ‘What steps are being taken?’”

The Coroner’s Office sees around 400 identified bodies province-wide go unclaimed each year. (Huyer said he did not know how many identified and unclaimed bodies might be SIU cases, but said there “certainly is not a large number of them.”)

In an email to the Star, Mary-Lou Swanek said an SIU investigator met with family in Toronto, four days after they learned Blair was dead and “took full blame” for not contacting anyone. She said the investigator said her son’s cellphone was damaged and had been disposed of, and he had no other belongings left to claim.

“There are many more details surrounding my son’s death, that do not add up,” she said. “I don’t want anyone to go through what my family and I have. This is a story of a broken and flawed system.”

Davin Charney, the Toronto lawyer representing the family, said that what is left unsaid in the notice to the Crown is how devastating it has been for the family to have gone through all this.

“It’s one thing to lose their child, but another thing in a terrible circumstance, but then also to have this indignity piled on top of them,” said Charney. “I feel for them.”

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