The morning phone call came at about 11:30, and it brought some sort of peace.

Thelma Favel hadn’t slept much, up since 5 a.m., waiting for the call she had been told to expect.

Sgt. John O’Donovan was on the line, calmly explaining to Favel that Winnipeg Police had made an arrest in the slaying of her great niece, Tina Fontaine. That 53-year-old Raymond Joseph Cormier had been charged in Vancouver with second-degree murder. “I feel relieved,” Favel says softly. “But that’s still not going to bring her home.”

The story had galvanized the country, ever since that summer’s day almost 16 months ago when Tina’s tiny body bobbed up against the Alexander Docks in Winnipeg’s Red River. In this Tina Fontaine, wrapped in plastic, weighted, disposed, became an emblem of the tragedy of the country’s missing and murdered indigenous women.

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“She was 15 years old but she looked to be about 12,” Favel says. “Someone who was so defenceless.”

Favel had all but raised Tina, whose own father was murdered in a drunken brawl. Favel has never shirked from the troubled pieces of Tina’s past. And all these months has sought answers as to what had happened to the doe-eyed girl who had travelled to Winnipeg that hot summer.

O’Donovan told her little, Favel recounts from her home in Powerview-Pine Falls. “All he said was that she was killed instantly and that’s all he was able to tell me.” She says she asked the lead investigator how Tina was killed, but that O’Donovan would not say. “Just that this guy has a long history of crime against young girls. He’s originally from New Brunswick and they found him in Vancouver.”

She does not know if items of clothing sent overseas for DNA testing gave up any answers. “I don’t know. I didn’t even ask about that. I was crying too hard. So relieved they found someone.”

Now, Favel says, she has mixed emotions. “I got this closure for Tina but I’m thinking about all the other women that are still waiting for answers, that have been waiting even longer than I have.” Cases that stretch back years, even decades. She rhymes off names. Bernadette Smith, whose sister, Claudette Osborne, has been missing for seven years. Janet Bruyere, whose granddaughter, Fonessa, was found dead and naked on another August day, in 2007.

Favel has Tina’s younger sister, Sarah, at home with her. Sarah is pregnant and knows now that she’s having a girl. “She’s having her own family again, seeing as how the other two were tragically taken from her.”

Favel sounds so weary when she speaks of Tina. “I’ll never hear her voice. I’ll never see her smile anymore. Only in my memories. It’s just, to have that closure. To have someone pay for what they did to a little girl.”