Jack Danylchuk
Northern News Services
Monday, July 16, 2007
YELLOWKNIFE - The parents of a teenage boy who drowned while in the care of a healing camp want to know why its operators left him in the care of an unqualified supervisor.
The bodies of Michael Lunzy, left, and Randy Leisk Jr., right,.were discovered by volunteers in Great Slave Lake on Thursday. |
"My son was supposed to be glued to her hip," said Darlene Leisk, describing her view of the responsibility Bertha Blondin and her son Grant had for her son Randy Jr.
"Instead, she went to a meeting in Fort Providence, and he went to work at his job at Diavik."
The 15-year-old was performing community service work at Blondin's Sacred Flame Healing Camp when he and Michael Luzny, 18, disappeared July 5 after they abandoned a boat in the North Arm of Great Slave Lake and attempted to swim ashore.
Volunteer searchers from Yellowknife and Behchoko found the bodies of the youths July 12, near North Arm Park, not far from where the boat carrying Nazon Goulet, the sole survivor of the tragedy, drifted ashore.
The people left in charge of the camp were Goulet and Michael Luzny, according to his aunt Betty.
"He's got CPR; he's been trained in basic bush skills," she said. "He knows the rules on the water, he knows the lake, he knows that she takes what she wants and doesn't give it back unless she wants to. He knows to stay with the boat, but they are teenagers. They think they're invincible. They saw land and they thought they could swim for it.
"They (the Blondins) had too much faith in him," she concluded.
Michael Luzny also had brushes with law and had spent time at the Blondins' camp. He had been known, when bored with the quiet and isolation of the place, to take the boat to Rae and then catch a ride into Yellowknife so he could hang out with his friends.
"They were told not to go into Rae unless it was to get supplies," said Betty Luzny.
"Those three boys decided on their own. There was a quad but no fuel, and you know teenagers. They had to have fuel for that quad. There was no real adult supervision so they behaved like teenagers: they did what they wanted to do."
The camp was an alternative to youth detention for Randy Leisk Jr., who was in breach of probation on charges that followed his conviction in youth court earlier this year after a rash of snowmobile thefts.
Darlene Leisk said that Judge Brian Bruser ordered her son to spend two months working at the camp, which would cover what he owed in fines and an order to perform community service.
According to Leisk, after the Blondins left the camp on the Tuesday following the Canada Day weekend, Randy, Luzny and Goulet took a small aluminum boat and headed for Behchoko for supplies that included "some weed."
The trio made it back to Old Fort Rae, but then attempted a second trip to Behchoko and ran out of gas. They spent the night on an island in the North Arm and the next day set out to paddle back to the camp. When they saw land, Luzny and Leisk left Goulet in the boat and attempted to swim to shore.
Betty Luzny said the youths left behind at Old Fort Rae had a satellite telephone, and might have alerted authorities if they thought there was trouble.
"But they just assumed that the boys got a ride to Yellowknife," she said.
Bertha Blondin has since returned to the camp but could not be reached by telephone.
In an interview earlier this year, Blondin told Yellowknifer that the organization that runs the camp, Nats'eju' Dahk'e, which translates as "place of healing," blends aspects of holistic healing and traditional aboriginal activities. She described it as a charitable organization that since 2002 has been running sacred circle programs.
Nats'eju' Dahk'e is listed in the phone book and a voice message promises to return calls. Its address is listed as 5103 51 Street but Blondin told Yellowknifer that difficulty in keeping the office staffed prompted her to relinquish the space. The Sacred Fire Healing Camp operates from facilities donated by the North Slave Metis Society.
Blondin also told Yellowknifer that Nats'eju' Dahk'e gets funding from the federal and territorial governments as well as the city, various businesses and churches.
Public accounts for the territorial government's Department of Justice show that taxpayers spent $135,000 over the past two years to provide wilderness camp operators with funding for "on the land programs."
Justice department officials said this week that the government doesn't operate any wilderness camps for youths and does not have any regulations governing how they are run.
NWT coroner Percy Kinney said it could be months before he decides whether to call an inquest into the deaths. "That's step 30 in the process and we're at step three," said Kinney who spent Friday interviewing the parents of the two youths.
"I haven't decided whether to call for autopsies. It would take four months for those reports."
