“He was my father,” Kim Lawson said in past tense as she introduced herself at last week’s vigil for 67-year-old Joseph Alexander ‘Alex’ Lawson.

Kim spoke for only two minutes to a group of 18 people who’d gathered outside of a Thunder Bay apartment building on the first cold day of winter. She ended by saying, “I hope they find him – soon.”

Her friends struggled to keep the vigil candles lit in the wind. It had been two years to-the-day since Alex had walked through that apartment door, crossed this sidewalk, then disappeared. After so much time, the Lawson family is living in the painful space between grief and hope. Not knowing whether Alex is alive means not knowing how to commit to either one.

“I think about him every day and I go back and forth. I think maybe he got tired of Thunder Bay and hitchhiked somewhere. My dad can survive the streets. I have hope that he’s out there,” Kim explains.

“And then there are other days when sometimes I do think he’s gone, but I don’t want to give up. I want to bring him home and have some kind of closure for me and my family. Not knowing where he is every day is extremely difficult. I don’t wish this on anyone – and I hope somebody comes forward.”

Alex was last seen on November 27, 2022. On average, two to three missing persons are reported to the Thunder Bay Police Service per day, disproportionately Indigenous people. And while the vast majority of those cases are resolved within a day, the service is also notorious across Canada for having been the first conclusively found to harbour anti-Indigenous systemic racism, particular to how it handles missing persons cases and death investigations.

In early December 2022, Kim drove 400 kilometres from her home in Sioux Lookout to do some Christmas shopping in northwestern Ontario’s largest city.

She stopped in on her father twice, but he wasn’t around. A man in the apartment stairwell who knew Alex only as “The Silver Fox” said he hadn’t seen him lately. But Kim knew this was a large building, some random resident who didn’t even know him by name not having seen him was no cause for alarm. The worker at the Dew Drop Inn soup kitchen that Alex frequented didn’t recognize him from Kim’s photo. She didn’t worry about that either; the young man was new to the job.

“I didn’t think anything of it,” she recalls. “My dad was hard to get a hold of. And because we didn’t live here, I thought, ‘he’s probably out and he’ll pop up somewhere.’”

She didn’t know it had already been two weeks since Alex hadn’t been seen.

Kim was in Winnipeg with her son on December 27 when her aunt called from Mishkeegogamang First Nation to report that Alex had officially been declared missing.

She felt called to lead the search but she didn’t know where to start. The mother and dental hygienist by day lives in a town 30 times smaller than Thunder Bay. By her account, her only education in detective work comes from streaming crime shows.

She dropped her son off with his dad and swung by Sioux Lookout to take the time off work. She passed the homeless shelter on her way out of town, where she ran into the OPP. She showed the police a photo of Alex to ask if the local detachment received the poster her cousin had made.

An officer compared a search like the one she was about to embark on to, “finding a needle in a haystack.”

“I remember him saying, ‘oh, that’s not good. Thunder Bay will swallow you up.’”

Kim had lived in the city when she was young. She remembered people yelling racist insults out of car windows at her. There were times when she was followed in retail stores. She would hear how hard it was on the streets. She knew what happens to those who go missing in Thunder Bay.

She thought about it all the way down the Trans-Canada Highway to the head of Lake Superior. This infamous story that Indigenous families from this land keep going through when loved ones go missing in that city, it was happening to her now. On the other hand, her father really was a fox, street smart and known to be friendly, but well-known to mind his own business.

“After living here for almost sixty years, at his age is when he goes missing?”

Kim didn’t quite believe it. She arrived in Thunder Bay on January 31, 2023 with a plan.  

The first day, she printed posters and plastered them through the downtown cores. Then she circled around to the Dew Drop Inn again. Staff and patrons met her with shaking heads. She got the same reactions at the homeless shelter and the community hub across town. She hit every bar where he might have been sharing a laugh with a friend or stranger; where she could discover he was safe, and this had all been a big misunderstanding.

It didn’t even turn up a lead.

It was getting eerie how no one had seen him. Before he disappeared, Alex was a fixture in Thunder Bay. He would talk to anyone. Alex had a recognizable short stature, topped with flowing, white hair that wisped off his shoulders with every step of his bouncing stride.

“You can pick him out a mile away,” Kim says. “You can tell him by his walk.”

Starting to fear something might truly be wrong, Kim thought to check with Alex’s bank. She found he’d taken out $80 on the night he went missing. It was the last time anyone had accessed his account. The fob on his keys had a unique fingerprint in the apartment’s security system. Records showed no one had used it since that day.

Back in his apartment, his wallet sat empty on the table with a deck of cigarettes and some chocolate. She knew he’d sometimes leave his identification at home if he thought he might be drinking, but the scene looked to her as though he’d intended to come right back.

She asked for security camera footage at city hall, the bus terminals, and businesses on major thoroughfares. Only Alex’s apartment complex kept the recordings over the two months since he was last seen.

Kim hovered over the screen, watching her father leaving the apartment. He was wearing a black baseball cap, a light-coloured North Face “puffer jacket,” blue jeans, and black shoes. The camera couldn’t quite reach the road, so it wasn’t clear if he was catching a bus or meeting someone, or even which direction he was going.

She was reaching the edge, herself. This was going to take a lot more help.

Over the three decades that the Thunder Bay saga has unfurled with missing First Nations people, deaths, police negligence, systemic racism and alleged criminality, First Nations communities all across Northwestern Ontario have built a web of support for families who need searches.

“People said ‘search the outskirts.’ Well, where? It really was like searching for a needle in a haystack, especially when you have people who aren’t comfortable talking to the police.”

Kim started on Facebook, then called Lac Seul First Nation, the community where she holds membership and where Alex lived until he was seized in the 60’s Scoop as a boy. Her relatives helped marshal the resources of the region’s tribal councils.

Searchers descended on the city in short order from Mishkeegogamang, Cat Lake First Nation, Keewaytinook Okimakanak, Red Lake, the Independent First Nation Alliance, and all over Nishnawbe Aski Nation. Once supportive people in Thunder Bay received word that help was needed, they came out, too.

The Lawson family was thankful for the support, but the snowfall made the search extremely difficult. Even with so many volunteers, no trace of Alex or a clue of his whereabouts emerged after a whole week. Kim stayed for 17 days, doing everything she could with anyone who would help.

She was convinced the police were doing all they could, too. It was hard to realize that just wouldn’t be enough.

“I feel like they are trying,” Kim says. “There’s many people in my family who feel differently. I feel we lost valuable time from the day he went missing to the day he was reported.

“I watch crime shows. If you don’t find the person in the first 48 hours, the chance of finding them drops off.”

The Lawson family watched the police urgency fade, but they continued to lead similar searches in the spring and fall of 2023, then another in the summer of 2024. In all, there were 10 organized efforts. Searchers canoed the rivers in the summer. A diving company used sonar to check the waterways and didn’t even bill for their time. Volunteers would reach out year-round to remind Kim and her siblings that people were searching on their own, holding out hope.

Meanwhile, calls trickled in claiming Alex has been sighted as far east as Ottawa and Toronto, as far west as Calgary and Vancouver, and as close by as Winnipeg and Dauphin.

Kim says hitchhiking has always been Alex’s “main mode of transportation,” so none of those places seemed far-fetched. She’s just skeptical that he would have left his home in Thunder Bay carrying no identification or belongings, at night, in the wintertime.

“Every time I come back to this city, my heart just drops. I drive past his apartment at least once. You drive around, just thinking, ‘where could he be?’ And you just wish you could see him walking down the road. It’s hard to come back to this city,” Kim says.

“We’re just trying our best to keep it out there that he has a family that cares for him, that wants him, that wants him back.”Lac Seul First Nation and Lawson’s family have committed a $15,000 reward for information on his whereabouts. The Thunder Bay Police has established a tipline at (807) 684-1055 while anonymous tips can reach Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-8477 or www.p3tips.com.

Jon Thompson is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter based in Thunder Bay. Contact him with tips and story ideas at editor@ricochet.media. Sign up here for his newsletter and never miss a story from northern Ontario.