Moses Martin has been carrying a photo of his granddaughter Lisa Marie Young in his wallet for 27 years. While the photo has faded and the edges have peeled away over the years, her smiling 16-year-old face remains visible and vibrant.
Lisa Marie Young was last seen on June 30, 2002 accepting a ride from Christopher William Adair, who she had just met at a nightclub, to get some fast food. RCMP questioned Adair shortly after Young went missing but nobody has ever been charged with Young’s disappearance.
Every year since her disappearance, friends and family have searched, rallied and marched calling for justice asking the question “where is Lisa?”
The family hopes that keeping Young in the public eye will encourage people who know something to come forward to police.
In 2022, a $50,000 US reward was offered for information leading to the recovery of Young’s body. This followed the Island Crime podcast series highlighting her disappearance by journalist Laura Palmer in 2020.
On Friday, Oct. 18 family, friends and city officials gathered in the rain and wind to dedicate a tree in Departure Bay, also known by its Snuneymuxw name Stiil’nep, to Lisa Marie Young.
“We’ll always remember what happened here today,” Martin said. “A place to come and sit down and enjoy the view that you have here and think about Lisa’s disappearance and as well as the memories.”
Martin said it was uplifting for the family to keep Young’s memory alive in this way. “We call that medicine, because that’s what it is for us as First Nations People,” he told the crowd. “It’s a difficult thing to talk about, but we must do that, remind each other that you have to be aware of where your children are, especially our girls.”
Young’s foster sister Carol Ann Bosma was at the event wearing a hooded sweatshirt reading “I wear red for my sister.”
“She’s been missing longer than she was alive,” Bosma said. “So that’s really tough, but I really like that a tree has been planted in her memory, because then that gives her loved ones somewhere to go. Because there wasn’t really anywhere we could go to sit in peace and be with her or think about her.”
Cindy Hall was friends with Young when they were teenagers and later became a key organizer for the annual march for justice in her case after Young’s mother Joanne died in 2017.
“It means the world to me, because it’s a very special place, and all of Lisa’s loved ones finally have somewhere to come and mourn her,” she told The Discourse. “Because when someone’s taken from you, you don’t have a place, you don’t have a grave, you don’t have the person’s ashes on a mantle. You don’t have any of that.”
Young was living in an apartment on Barons Road just off Departure Bay near Country Club mall when she went missing and one of the areas for the initial searches for her was in the Departure Bay area.
“This was her neighborhood,” Bosma told The Discourse. “So when I was told that it was in Departure Bay, it just was so fitting, being by the water, being in the Nanaimo community, and being right down the road from where she used to live. I found it really touching, this would have been an area that she would have frequented and been familiar with.”
Mayor Leonard Krog spoke to the small crowd ahead of the tree-planting ceremony saying he was proud of the work that Young’s family and friends have done to keep her case in the spotlight.
“I’m proud of this community, but it’s not enough,” he said. “We have to do more. We have to step in when we see something wrong happening. We have to be prepared to defend and prevent when we see violence, when we see bullying of whatever kind, we need to say something. We need to step in physically where necessary. It is our duty as citizens. We cannot build a country where we won’t be memorializing wonderful people like Lisa Marie if we don’t play our part.”
The plaque dedicating the tree to Lisa Marie Young and all other missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people has lyrics of Lisa’s Song by Allison Crowe and Band. It reads:
Just stay home
Don’t come outside and play
Circumstances beyond control
I feel so helpless
Mind is racing and breaking
Me into a million pieces
Because I can’t
Take you home
Across the river and to your door
Take you home and
Cut through the darkness
You don’t have to cry anymore
Take you home
And hold you in, hold you in, hold you in.
