Sophie Wassaykeesic’s death under investigation

Gary Wassaykeesic and his brother Tom Wassaykeesic are feeling positive about the Ontario Provincial Police’s investigation into the 1976 death of their mother, Sophie Wassaykeesic.
“I just got interviewed the other week,” said Tom Wassaykeesic, a councillor in Mishkeegogamang First Nation. “I gave a statement on what little I knew about it. I just told them when I was informed about my mother’s death in 1976, I said I wasn’t even informed by the police themselves, it was by someone working for the band.”
Tom Wassaykeesic said he never had any follow up from the OPP on his mother’s death.
“For many years, other than what I was told by that band employee at the time, I never actually saw any kind of death certificate,” Tom Wassaykeesic said. “It was last year when I wrote a letter to the person who was then the original coroner. He sent me the death certificate.”
Tom Wassaykeesic said he was about 18 at the time when he was first told his mother had died.
“I was helping some friends unload some firewood that day,” Tom Wassaykeesic said. “It was in the evening towards March. The guy who came over to tell me about it, his name was Roy. He’s deceased now. It was a real shock.”
Tom Wassaykeesic said his first concern at the time was for his two younger brothers who had still been living with his mother.
“I wanted to make sure they were OK,” Tom Wassaykeesic said. “I guess by then they had already been apprehended by the Children’s Aid Society.”
Gary Wassaykeesic said the OPP investigator had asked him to help locate four people for police interviews.
“I was able to give him phone numbers, the whole bit, where they could be,” Gary Wassaykeesic said. “I’m still in touch with quite a few people back home because of all this. So I know where quite a few of the people are who they should be looking for.”
Gary Wassaykeesic said he is still waiting to see the original police report on his mother’s death.
“The Elders on the reserve are starting to come forward with their stories,” Gary Wassaykeesic said.
While his mother’s death was recorded as a death by suffocation, due to alcohol, Gary Wassaykeesic said two years ago that he believes there was more to her death than what was recorded, suggesting she may have been murdered.
He said he has talked to people who said they heard “a lot of banging” at the time she died.
“I was in residential school when it happened,” Gary Wassaykeesic said. “I had to find out on my own.
“When I did find out, they didn’t tell me the details either. They just informed me that my mother was dead.”
Gary Wassaykeesic said one of the major problems in his investigation is that the Ontario Provincial Police’s Central Patricia detachment burned down years ago along with all the information on his mother’s death.
OPP Det. Staff Sgt. Mark Hutchinson said in December that the case came to the OPP through the coroner’s office and the OPP are following up on some of the information Gary Wassaykeesic had provided.
“We are going to provide a report to the coroner’s office and then the coroner will make a determination if there is anything further they can do from their end,” Hutchinson said.