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“It can get pretty rocky. That’s part of her story, but it’s not the whole story. She was getting better. She was in a home getting help with harm reduction and they were doing a wonderful job. She was staying with the program and taking her meds. She was starting to come back to herself again. Then this tragedy.”

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Ahshellla was artistic — a trait she inherited from her birth mother, Potts said — and loved to work with graphics and colour. She loved fashion, drawing and sketching. And though she had learned traditional skills like beading and leather work from her birth mom, she brought a modern sensibility to her art.

“She was very much a 21st-century person. But she brought some of those traditional Anishnabe crafts with her,” Potts said.

“She did get into some trouble with the law. There’d be the odd incident like walking into a wine store and walking out with a bottle of wine. The typical things you see with someone with addiction.”

For the last year or so, Ahshellla had been living at the John Howard Society’s Rita Thompson Residence in Ottawa. After her death, memorial services were held there and at the Elders’ Building on Bear Island, where Potts works as a health services manager.

Potts would see her occasionally when he was in town, sometimes taking her out for breakfast, but last spring she stopped responding to his messages.

He got a phone message from Ottawa police a couple of days after the hit-and-run.

“She was a beautiful person. She loved helping people. She liked to encourage people to be themselves,” he said. “She accepted you as you were. There was not a lot of judgment.

“But her mental health started to interfere with that and she kind of went into her own world, and broke ties with friends and family. She was a really artistic young lady, but she just didn’t seem to have a chance in life because of the mental health issues and the self-medication and her getting into the drug scene. That hindered her from blossoming as an artist.”

Ahshellla Sarah Huxtable is survived by Potts, her stepmother Ronda Potts, sisters, Casey, Chante, Tammy and Michelle, brothers, Jason and Ben, and her two children: Luke and Simyn.