The last time Lindsay Cyre ever spoke to her son Kole May-Cyre it was on Christmas morning. The two met outside, she says, under the bridge near the German Cultural Centre in Nanaimo.
“We just talked, and we cried a lot,” she says. “His feelings towards the family were pretty raw. He felt at times like no one cared about him, no one loved him. There was a lot of fighting going on.”
He was upset at members of the family but also specifically with a cousin who had recently started living at his grandmother Enid May’s house, says Lindsay. This house was also where 19-year-old Kole had lived for five years with his father Craig May, though at times he also stayed in shelters or in tents.
“It was a lot of mixed emotions, a lot of different things going on. He couldn’t separate anything that was going on in his life,” says Lindsay. “There was a lot of chaos that he led in his life.”
After they spoke, Lindsay — who also currently lives in a shelter — says she went to Risebridge Society’s warming centre to eat and take some food for Kole, who was working a shift that afternoon at the Overdose Prevention Site on Albert Street. However, by the time she arrived there in the early afternoon the other workers said they hadn’t seen him, which she thought was strange.
That night the family was supposed to gather at Craig’s sister Wanda’s house. But Kole never showed up, says Lindsay.
He had a girlfriend in Duncan that he was anxious to reconnect with, and she figured he had gone off to try and see her. But it wasn’t like him to miss a shift at his job. Chaotic life or not, she says he was reliable, and a hard worker.
During the following few days, Lindsay said it looked like Kole had used a tent she had set up in Bowen Park. Over the weeks that followed, friends reported seeing him, but by Jan. 9 he was finally reported missing, according to a Nanaimo RCMP press release.
Three weeks later, the RCMP came to his house, says Craig.
“They explained that they had found Kole,” says Lindsay. “But he was dead.”
“He basically froze to death. Hypothermia,” adds Craig.
“I just dropped. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but somehow I knew [he was dead]. I don’t know how I knew, but … it still bothers me to this day,” says Lindsay.
From what they were told by the RCMP and later by the coroner, Kole was found under a deck by a Telus worker on Jan. 22, at a residential property in downtown Nanaimo. There was no foul play suspected, and as there were drugs in his system and evidence of drug use around his body, the family was told that it was possibly a combination of hypothermia and drugs that caused his death.
“That really upset me,” says Kole’s grandmother Enid, recalling her conversation with both the police and the coroner. “I knew he took drugs, but I didn’t for one minute think that he’d die of hypothermia.”
It was estimated that Kole had been dead for somewhere between seven and 14 days. It’s likely he died during a severe cold snap in Nanaimo during which temperatures dropped to a record low of -15 on Jan. 12 and 13, and shelter spaces in the city were limited.
Around this time, Risebridge’s executive director Jovonne Johnson spoke to Nanaimo News Now about difficulties in getting the word out, especially to people sleeping outside, to let them know when there was space to come inside.
A piece missing
“[Kole] was a very happy child,” remembers Lindsay. “When it was time to get up, he was getting dressed and ready to go, he was running around. And he loved interacting with other kids and playing soccer.”
Lindsay was adopted as a child and was born with fetal alcohol spectrum disorders (FASD). Despite being a good student and going on to complete a university program, she says her FASD made her the target of bullies.
She noticed Kole beginning to struggle when he started high school, and recalls one incident in particular that really bothered him.
“A teacher told him, ‘The only reason you’re struggling with school and to keep up with classes is because you have fetal alcohol syndrome like your mother,’” which isn’t true, says Lindsay. But Kole believed the teacher, and ever since then, his self-esteem seemed to go downhill.
Enid says he did briefly attend an alternate program at John Barsby Secondary where the teachers and principal were supportive, but he wasn’t able to stick it out to graduation.
“I just remember him being a really happy kid. Nothing unusual. He was, you know, being raised in a rough environment and that came out a bit,” says D’Arcy Cyre, Kole’s uncle and Lindsay’s brother.
When he learned Lindsay was pregnant, he paid particular attention to Kole’s health and well-being, in part because he was worried Lindsay’s FASD might make her vulnerable as a parent.
The family appeared to be stable and were consistently housed until Kole was six or seven years old, says D’Arcy, when he noticed Lindsay and Craig’s living situation begin to deteriorate, and he suspected they were using drugs.
At this point D’Arcy also began to lose touch with his nephew, and looked into the possibility of Kole coming to live with him and his own children, but was told by the Ministry of Children and Family Development that they had already investigated the issue.
“They saw no reason to remove him, despite family objections,” says D’Arcy, who is Cree on his father’s side and British on his mother’s. Lindsay is also Cree, so he thought it also made sense culturally.
“It was very confusing, because you know how it goes for Indigenous kids being taken away by the system. I was blown away at the time,” he says.
From that point on, D’Arcy didn’t have much contact with Kole other than some brief sightings in 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I saw him twice, and he didn’t look good. He was obviously in addiction himself,” says D’Arcy, who reiterated his support to Kole and let him know he could come and live with him anytime.
“At times me and him had a very rough relationship. And at times we didn’t. But I loved him no matter what. He was everything to me. He was my world. And now that he’s no longer with me I have that feeling that there’s a piece of me missing,” says Lindsay.
‘He was so sweet’
Kole was a hard worker and was always looking to pick up shifts as a peer support worker with the Nanaimo Area Network of Drug Users (NANDU), says Sara Lee, who works as NANDU’s outreach coordinator.
“I loved him. He was so sweet,” she says. The two were close and spoke often. “He was very polite and happy whenever he saw me he’d give me a big hug, with a big smile on his face. But you could tell he was battling something, at the same time. He was kind of depressed.”
Lee says she thinks it was depression that contributed to his substance use, though in the months before his disappearance she believes he had gotten clean and seemed better and much happier.
“I’m pretty sure his death was preventable,” she says. “He told me that he wanted to talk to somebody [about his mental health] but he didn’t know how, and he didn’t want to tell anyone because it was embarrassing.”
In 2020 there were 144 deaths of unhoused residents in B.C., a number which rose to 267 in 2021, according to a recent report from the BC Coroner’s Service. By 2022, those numbers rose again to 342 deaths, a 138 per cent increase compared to 2020.
Of those deaths, half were of people who were unsheltered — which is generally considered to be in places not generally used as regular sleeping accommodation, like doorways or abandoned buildings — and occurred more often during the fall and winter months.
As the family prepares to honour Kole at a memorial service on March 2, D’Arcy says he struggles with feelings of whether he “did enough” to protect and help his nephew, and says he has concerns about how the system continues to fail to protect or provide services for unsheltered and vulnerable people, especially youth.
Editor’s note, March 13, 2024: The article has been edited to reflect the additional information that Kole had lived at his grandmother’s for approximately five years.
If you need help, there are resources available:
- Suicide Crisis Helpline: 988
- Mental health: 310-6789 (24 hours)
- Kids Help Phone: Text CONNECT to 686868
- Vancouver Island Crisis Society: 24-hour crisis line 1‑888‑494‑3888. Text between 6 p.m. and 10 p.m.: 250-800-3806
- KUU-US Crisis Line Society 24-hour Indigenous B.C.-wide crisis line
- Island Health’s Service Link: 1-888-885-8824. Phone line answered by addictions and recovery workers to help with referrals
Other mental health supports:
- Youthspace (open 6 p.m. to midnight for Canadian youth under 30)
- Foundry BC (free virtual individual and group counselling for ages 12 to 24)
- BounceBack (Canadian Mental Health Association BC program with free virtual coaching and self-guided support for people 15 and over)
- Ministry of Children and Family Development Child and Youth Mental Health (Referral and intake, time-limited early interventions, assessments, therapy and intervention and consultation)
- First Nations Health Authority (Information for First Nations communities on mental wellness, substance use prevention and treatment, overdose information and treatment centres)
