April Woodhouse, 50, was found lying outside on the steps of a house in Pinaymootang First Nation—about 240 kilometres northwest of Winnipeg—not far from where she lived.
In the hospital, she said they were told April had signs of internal bleeding. When Stagg went into the hospital room, she noticed something else.
“I was holding her hand, and I noticed her hands were badly beaten,” she said, adding there were marks on her sister’s body.
When Stagg called RCMP, she was told her sister’s death was not being considered a homicide.
When CTV News first reached out to Manitoba RCMP on Tuesday, a spokesperson said April’s death was a “medical incident.”
However, one day later, RCMP responded to CTV News again. This time the police said an investigation is underway.
I don’t deny that an investigation and autopsy should be performed.
But was the sister a nurse or doctor to make the determination that the marks weren’t caused by frostbite?
I ask because frostbite can absolutely look like a beating:
Either way, this is tragic, and hope the family find the answers they’re looking for.
It almost doesn’t matter what the final verdict turns out to be here, because the result of the investigation isn’t really the issue.
Because of the institutional history of racism, the RCMP’s decision on whether or not to investigate the death (or disappearance) of an Indigenous person isn’t considered trustworthy anymore. Their only option if they want to regain some credibility is to investigate even if they don’t think it’s necessary—investigate every case that’s even remotely questionable for the next several decades. They did this to themselves.
This also holds for many other police forces throughout the country. They ignored or dismissed (or even caused) these incidents for many years, and now the chickens are—slowly, but inevitably—coming home to roost.
I agree with you 100%. Institutionalized racism is still quite common.
My issue is the reporting. Any time a tragedy happens, families always say “my loved one would never do that” or “I don’t think this was an accident.”.
Grief has you looking for anything that makes sense, but the opinions of family aren’t fact, and there are details that should have been left out of the report, since it’s all speculation.
The important part is that an investigation has been launched, and the family can get more answers than they were given.
Too often cops ignore what happens to First Nations people and blow them off.
This is what happened here.
Good thing the CBC questioned the cops, because otherwise nothing would have been done.
I’m think that, too.
But the accusation that she was beaten and left for dead really shouldn’t be published if it was just on a hunch from a family member.
It does nothing productive, and end up creating further divisions between our First Nations and the RCMP or local police.
Of course, if it ends up that she was in fact beaten and left for dead, then it should be published that police were pressured to act in order to find the truth.
If the coroner ends up concluding that it was merely bad luck on her part, will the family accept that?
You argue a lot for the benefit of the cops here. You a member of force or what?
No, it’s a matter of principle.
If the media is misrepresenting the facts of the case, it hurts First Nation people.
Family always has other explanations for why their loved one died under tragic circumstances. It’s probably a coping mechanism. But since when do we take opinion over fact?
Do you think the cops would have done the same thing if it had been a white woman who was found dead on a neighbour’s doorstep?
I’m not denying or defending the steps police took in this case. I hate bad cops as much as the next person.
There’s an obvious history of First Nation and other indigenous groups being ignored by police.
If it turns out that autopsy concludes that this death was simply an accident, the way it’s been reported will only serve to divide the community and their law enforcement.
The hospital staff told the family the victim had signs of internal bleeding. That is not caused by frostbite.
I’m not a doctor, but apparently, hypothermia can affect the body’s ability to properly clot blood, which could result in internal bleeding.
In studies where induced hypothermia is administered to a patient in surgery, it’s been noted that bleeding risk is elevated.
The corner should be able to make this determination.
Blood doesn’t need to clot without ruptured blood vessels letting it out where it’s not supposed to be. In other words, it wouldn’t matter if there weren’t wounds to begin with. As to elevated bleeding risk in surgery, typically surgery involves cutting flesh and the blood vessels therein, hence wounds to be affected by the elevated bleeding risk.
But neither frostbite nor hypothermia cause internal bleeding.
The hypothesis is that someone experiencing hypothermia may not have the ability to coordinate their movements, resulting in falls or impacts to their body, leading to possible internal bleeding.
They didn’t specify where this internal bleeding came from, and I find it odd that they would be looking for internal bleeding in an apparent case of hypothermia. But I’ll repeat, I’m not a doctor, so I have no idea what the protocol is for something like that.
I do know that my wife was once hypothermic after falling into frozen water, and they didn’t do any internal diagnostics.
The hypothesis behind your statement, you mean? Well, you just said your wife fell in frozen water and went hypothermic, and they didn’t check for internal injuries. That’s because they didn’t suspect foul play, and they had no reason to look for internal injuries. But if there’s a possibility of internal injury, medical staff will check for it. A possibility like if someone had in fact died of exposure and murder, instead of dying of only exposure. This is a possibility that must be considered when you just find a body in the snow.
There would be no specification of where the internal injuries came from because nobody has a crystal ball to know. Even if the police investigate, it’s still going to be a “best guess” at what happened based on things like the coroner’s report. Before an investigation it would be actively irresponsible for an official to speculate in public. (Source: reddit detectives thinking they found the Boston bomber)
That’s the thing, though. How is that determination made? And did the hospital tell the police, or only the sister?
We must be missing some key information that hopefully the coroner (and the investigation) can shed light on.
Keep in mind, most of what we know is coming from the sister, who appears to have only appeared on the scene after her sister had been moved to the kitchen of the home with heaters set up to warm her up.
We know nothing about whether April was found without a jacket (temps were -20C that day) or bleeding or anything, really. Was she dragged into the home by the people helping her (which could cause internal bleeding), or was she carried in, or did she walk in??
We are so in the dark here. I’d really not speculate any more, because I can think of 101 scenarios both supporting homicide or an accident.
The determination is made by the circumstances under which the body is found; I was trying to imply this in my last post. If a body is found with no evidence as to how it got there or why the person in question is a corpse, we don’t just shrug and go about our business.
We are indeed missing a lot of information. I’m not speculating about anything. I’m maintaining my original point that frostbite/hypothermia do not cause internal bleeding on their own, which is patently true, and answering what seem to be questions. I’m not a doctor or a police officer, but I have some baseline knowledge from first aid and forensics courses (my interests are… eclectic, let’s say), so I share when I can.
Just to clarify, she was quite alive before going to the hospital, and was still alive hours after arriving there. They couldn’t keep her alive, but she wasn’t a random corpse that ended up being found in the woods somewhere - she was found on the steps of a home close to where she lives.
Did the home belong to people she knows (i.e. walked there and then something happened that left her in the cold), or was she put there? If she was put there, why? Someone who intended to kill her would certainly not put her somewhere safe to be found by others.
This case absolutely warrants an investigation, but I will still say that some of the most important details are missing here. We simply don’t know enough to draw conclusions from a single family member who wasn’t even the first person to find the deceased.
For sure, not out of the blue. That’s why information like “how did she get there?” and “how was she brought into the home?” are critical. Injuries happen if you fall after being disorientated, as one might be if they are suffering from hypothermia. Or they can happen if you’re being moved without care. These don’t necessarily point to homicide, and could very well fit the “medical incident” narrative being told by the RCMP.
I hope that the reports follow this case, because now I’m quite interested in the outcome. I feel terrible for the family. She was a mother and had quite a few grandkids.