WARNING: This story discusses violence against Indigenous women and girls and may affect those who have experienced it or know someone who has.
When Natasha Harrison’s 20-year-old daughter Tatyanna stopped answering her texts, Harrison made the drive from Langley to Vancouver to file a missing person’s report and search the streets herself.
For months, she combed through downtown Vancouver, checking women’s shelters and SROs, and stopping strangers on the sidewalk. She sent every lead and tip to the Vancouver Police Department.
“I found the friends and I found the ex-boyfriends,” she said, speaking from her sunny backyard in Langley. “But I could never find her.”
On May 2, Richmond RCMP found a woman’s remains on an older, 40-foot yacht that was in dry dock at a marina in the 6900 block of Graybar Road in Richmond. But although Harrison had provided police with a DNA sample, it wasn’t until three months later, on Aug. 5, that police confirmed the body was her daughter’s.
A coroner’s report found that Tatyanna, who is Cree and Métis on her father’s side, died from “fentanyl toxicity.” Harrison said her daughter had suffered from addiction since 2021, and she long worried for her safety.
But she said she’s haunted by the details of how her daughter’s body was found, and unsatisfied with the police finding that her death was not suspicious.
“You find her wearing only a shirt and no clothing — no pants, no underwear, no socks, no shoes, and you call that non-suspicious and you don’t do a rape kit on her?” she said.
“What happened to her? Did someone hold her there against her will? You know, I can accept her passing away from an overdose. It’s a lot easier than accepting what it really looks like.”
Harrison said she has no idea how her daughter ended up on a boat that is not accessible by public transit, without her clothes, and without personal identification. No drugs were found on the boat with her, and a coroner’s report did not determine how the drugs that killed her were ingested.
“You guys can’t tell me how she got in and out of a 24-hour surveillance shipping yard with $40-million yachts?” she said.
“You don’t take your own clothes off and overdose on a boat. None of it makes sense.”
FULL STORY: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/tatyanna-harrison-search-1.6570187
