Family wants police to step up investigation

The family of Angeline Pete, a 29-year-old woman who disappeared from Vancouver in May 2011, says police aren’t trying hard enough to find their loved one.
The young mother of a seven-year-old fled to the Downtown Eastside after suffering terrible domestic abuse. Grandmother Eileen Nelson said she spoke with Angeline every day, and sometimes several times a day until her disappearance. Mom Molly Dixon has been searching the streets of Vancouver for months in the hopes of uncovering clues to her daughter’s whereabouts.

“We meet with the RCMP and all they have is information we gave them two months ago,” said Dixon. “Is my daughter just another missing First Nations woman on a poster to them? She was not a sex-trade worker addicted to drugs,” Dixon is quoted in a story by Suzanne Fournier in The Province newspaper.

Worse yet, said Dixon, police have let Pete’s fiancé travel from Canada to South America. The police had charged the man with assaulting Pete, but the charges were stayed. Pete’s cousin said she last saw Angeline “getting unwillingly into a truck driven by her fiancé,” reported Fournier.

Police said they are taking the case very seriously, but Carol Martin of the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre says cross jurisdictional issues are frustrating progress. Vancouver PD and the RCMP are attempting to work the case from their specific perspectives.

“We were witness to the system’s gross negligence as well as racism and sexism in finding missing women in the 1990s, just as we are today,” said Martin, recalling efforts to track women who had fallen prey to serial killer Robert Pickton.