Three beautiful young women, who all died brutal deaths, all in Toronto, all within three months of each other in 2013.

First there was Cheyenne Santana Marie Fox, 20, who dropped from a 24th-floor condo balcony in north Toronto on the evening of April 24.

Then, Terra-Janine Gardner, 26, who was killed by a freight train near Yonge St. and Summerhill Ave., late on May 14.

Finally, Bella Laboucan-McLean, 25, who fell to her death from the 31st-floor of a CityPlace condo in the early morning hours of July 20.

Their stories are different, yet tragically the same.

“The similarity is that they were all First Nation,” observes community activist Audrey Huntley who, like the grieving families and friends of the three young women, has been disappointed by the dearth of local media coverage of these horrific deaths.

According to research by Kristen Gilchrist, co-founder of Families of Sisters in Spirit, missing and murdered aboriginal women receive 27 times less national print news attention than missing and murdered white women do — and even when they do, they get much less detailed and intimate coverage.

They are rarely headlines, merely statistics. If that.

But First Nations communities are mobilizing to put the word out, through actions such as Idle No More and Operation Thunderbird, which cast light on violence against aboriginal women. Missing and murdered indigenous women even have their own Twitter hashtag: #MMIW.

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“I think that we as Canadians have become aware in recent years about the terrible legacy, the experience, the lack of coverage of missing and murdered aboriginal women in Canada,” argues lawyer Emily Hill of Aboriginal Legal Services of Toronto. “We’re realizing that for too long, especially when young aboriginal women are reported missing by families, the police have dismissed their concerns and then the families’ fears turn out to be correct.”

Neither Fox, Gardner or Laboucan-McLean is missing. So far, there is no concrete evidence that any of them was murdered. But all died horrible and mysterious deaths.

The numbers of First Nations women who die violently are staggering. But they are also debatable.

They range as high as almost 600 victims in the last 25 years, according to a database compiled by Sisters in Spirit, whose funding was cut off by the Harper government in 2010. That research has been challenged by the RCMP, which claims that research doesn’t match what is in its own records. In the hopes of being more specific, Huntley is compiling a new database .

One thing is sure: According to StatsCan, First Nations women are three and half times more likely to be victims of violence than non-aboriginal women and seven times more likely to be murdered.

It is a shameful record, a product of a complex web of factors: historical, cultural, social, political.

“Systemic bias” is how B.C.’s Missing Women Commission of Inquiry chief Wally Oppal described the problem in his 1,448-page report , “Forsaken,” last December. Referring to serial killer Robert Pickton’s mostly aboriginal victims, he wrote, “They did not receive equal treatment by police.”

“I think that the experience of the Aboriginal community generally is that, as offenders and suspects, they are over-policed and over-imprisoned but, as victims, they are under-policed,” explains Hill. “Their experiences as victims, the loss of their lives, are not seen as valid.”

Which is why there is a growing clamour for a wide-ranging federal inquiry.

In February, for example, Human Rights Watch released “Those Who Take Us Away.” Among its findings are police abuse and sexual assault that result in First Nations women to afraid to seek help from the law.

In April, a United Nations Human Rights Report condemned Canada’s record on preventing violence against indigenous women and girls.

In July, Canada’s premiers demanded a national inquiry. Their call was immediately dismissed by the Harper government.

In October, James Anaya, UN Special Rapporteur on the rights of indigenous peoples, spent nine days travelling cross country. He remarked on the “disturbing phenomenon of aboriginal women missing and murdered at the hands of both aboriginal and non-aboriginal assailants, whose cases have a much higher tendency to remain unresolved than those involving non-aboriginal victims.”

And then, according to First Nations critics, the final insult.

In October’s Throne Speech, the government followed up a two-sentence mention of missing and murdered First Nations women with this: “Canadians also know that prostitution victimizes women and threatens the safety of our communities. Our Government will vigorously defend the constitutionality of Canada’s prostitution laws.”

And then it went on to the risks faced by police dogs.

“The fact that there are three young First Nation women who have died really tragic deaths in Toronto in 2013, whether it’s suicide, or getting pushed, or death by misadventure, is something we must examine,” insists Doug John-Hatlem, a former Toronto street pastor who knew two of the women killed. “Any real inquiry has got to ask the question what these women’s lives were like previous to their deaths.”

These portraits of Fox, Gardner and Laboucan-McLean are an attempt to tell the stories of three young women who, like so many others, came to Toronto in search of their futures.

Futures they never had a chance to live.