Mike on Crime

By Steve Lambert, THE CANADIAN PRESS

WINNIPEG – RCMP say a house fire believed to have killed an 11-year-old boy in a remote Manitoba aboriginal community was set deliberately and a 16-year-old boy has been arrested.

Charges had not yet been laid Thursday and the Mounties were tight-lipped on the cause of the fire on the Shamattawa reserve.

“We’re still working on those issues and it’s not something we’re prepared to release publicly at this point,” Sgt. Line Karpish said. “It is for all intents and purposes a homicide investigation.”

Investigators were still trying to piece together what exactly happened in the early morning hours Saturday and to confirm the identity of the victim, who is believed to be a boy in foster care whose disappearance went unnoticed for several hours.

An aboriginal leader suggested the boy somehow got into the house of his grandmother, who had run out of heating fuel and had left to stay at another relative’s home.

“The grandmother (of the boy) has said she locked the house when she left. No one was home. There was no heat in that home,” said David Harper, grand chief of the Manitoba Keewatinowi Okimakanak, which represents all northern First Nations in the province.

“She couldn’t get heating oil … so she went to one of her children’s homes until she was able to get heat again.”

The fire broke out about 4 a.m. RCMP tried to call the local fire chief – the only paid member of an otherwise volunteer service – but were unable to reach him. The fly-in community of 1,300 has a functioning fire truck and other equipment, but there was no one available to operate it as the blaze quickly tore through the house.

RCMP originally thought everyone survived the fire because they located the homeowner, who told them the house was empty.

What happened next has prompted calls for yet another inquiry into Manitoba’s troubled child welfare system.

It was 9 a.m. before people in the community realized the boy was missing. His grandparents believed he was with his foster parents and vice versa, Harper said.

“It happens in northern communities. Families sleep at different places. Everybody thought he was sleeping here, he was sleeping there.”

Some residents started searching for the boy, but it wasn’t until two days later – on Monday afternoon – that police and the local child welfare agency were told of the missing boy. That prompted a new search of the burned-out home and the discovery of human remains.

Manitoba’s Opposition Progressive Conservatives have called for an independent probe to find out how a child in foster care could disappear in the middle of the night and not be missed for many hours.

“We’ve seen too many kids fall through the cracks,” said Bonnie Mitchelson, Family Services critic.

The government promised swift action. It said the case will be reviewed by the provincial children’s advocate and the child welfare agency, and could be the subject of an inquest by the chief medical officer.

“I’m bound and determined to get to the bottom of this and … if there are shortcomings on the part of child welfare agencies, then we’re going to make the immediate changes that are necessary,” said Family Services Minister Gord Mackintosh.

Shamattawa residents received one bit of good news Thursday. Investigators determined that a second set of remains found in the burned house were caribou, not human, as originally thought. The possibility of a second victim had everyone baffled, because the 11-year-old was the only person reported missing in the community 750 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.

“It’s a little bit of relief, I would say, but the question still remains: how did the child end up in (the house)?” Harper said.