IV. Deaths in the family

Azraya’s friends and family say that finding answers about how she died will help get young people in Grassy Narrows back on track. So Darwin Fobister and other youngsters have become activists in seeking the truth.

Part of their challenge is understanding the role police played in Azraya’s final days.

“She was a nice, innocent, sweet girl. A sister that I loved and cared for,” said Azraya’s twin brother, Braeden Kokopenace, tears welling up in his eyes. “My sister was too young to go at this time and I believe police are part of it.”

When Azraya was struggling with her brother Calvin’s death, she asked her parents to put her in the care of a child welfare agency in Kenora so she could receive counselling. That’s when the trouble started. First, there was an altercation with a police officer outside the arena in Kenora, which was caught on video. In it, she is being held to the ground by the burly male officer, begging to go home. The OPP won’t answer questions about the incident.

It was a few weeks later that Azraya disappeared after police dropped her off at the hospital. She died nearby. It’s not clear whether a worker from Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services was with her at the hospital before she walked away into the woods. She was gone two days before a First Nations search team found her.

The man who discovered Azraya said she appeared to have died by suicide, but her family says they have not received a copy of her autopsy report.

Azraya’s family and friends have been pushing for an inquest. In July, the provincial coroner’s office told CBC News that its investigation was complete but that its reports would not be made public and that there would be no inquest. This was news to Azraya’s family.

Why couldn’t police find Azraya, when she was discovered across the road from where they’d dropped her off?

A week later, when CBC asked why the family had not been informed of the decision, the coroner’s office had a new answer: Azraya’s case would be reviewed by an internal inquest advisory committee in September.

In the vacuum created by this lack of answers, Azraya’s parents are left to ponder the theory that their daughter died by suicide.

If that is the case, there are questions her father, Marlin Kokopenace, wants answered. Did someone give her drugs or alcohol that contributed to her despair — and if so, are they culpable in her death? If Azraya was suicidal the night she disappeared, how did police and hospital staff miss the signs and let her walk away?

And, critically, why couldn’t police find Azraya, when she was discovered just across the road from where they’d dropped her off?

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Tragedy runs deep in Azraya’s family, and police have typically had some involvement in it. Azraya’s grandmother, Mary Eliza Keewatin, died in police custody in 1999, at the age of 57. Police had picked her up for public intoxication, but may have failed to notice she’d been injured. Keewatin was held at the Kenora jail, where she went into medical distress. She was later declared dead in hospital.

Keewatin’s two sons, Elvis, 24, and Morris, 29, died in 1992 while trying to swim to shore after police took their boat, leaving them stranded on an island. The pair were believed to have been high from sniffing gas. An inquest into their deaths recommended that police have better resources and training to understand the history of Grassy Narrows First Nation and deal more appropriately with community members when they find them in distress in Kenora.

Violence and a distrust of police keep spreading. Azraya’s aunt Lorenda Kokopenace said her son Christian was stabbed in the head last October, only hours after being released from police custody. The 22-year-old was in a coma for three days. In July, Lorenda started crowdsourcing a reward for information about the attack in the belief that police were ignoring the case.

“We know the police don’t care about us,” she said.

CBC News filed a freedom of information request to the Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services to get more details about Azraya’s case. It was denied, on the basis that it might interfere with a law enforcement matter, that it could facilitate the commission of an unlawful act and that the personal information in the case was highly sensitive.

A spokesperson for Ontario Provincial Police told CBC News that no internal investigations have resulted from any officer's conduct involving Azraya, but wouldn't say if the teen was in custody on the night she disappeared.

It's a critical point, because any death in custody in Ontario results in a mandatory inquest.

On the anniversary of Azraya’s death, the Lake of the Woods District Hospital issued a statement expressing condolences, but like police, officials there refused to answer any questions about what happened the night she walked away from the facility. Anishinaabe Abinoojii Family Services, the First Nations child welfare agency that was involved with Azraya, is similarly silent.