Family still searching for answers almost 2 years after Erin Brooks’s disappearance | CBC News
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When Laurie Brooks talks about her daughter, Erin, she speaks in the past tense.
Almost two years have gone by, and all that relatives of Erin Brooks know about what happened to her is that she’s likely no longer alive.
Police say Brooks was likely the victim of a homicide sometime after she was last seen buying cigarettes at St. Mary’s Smoke Shop on Dec. 27, 2021, at Sitansisk (St. Mary’s First Nation).
But exactly what happened to her, remains a mystery.
“We don’t have any closure,” Laurie Brooks said in an interview.
Since her disappearance, vigils have been held, searches have been conducted in woods around Fredericton, and anonymous donors have offered up a $65,000 reward for anyone with information that leads to finding Brooks.
Family members now see Brooks, a Wolastoqey woman and member of St. Mary’s First Nation, as one of hundreds of Indigenous women and girls who’ve either disappeared or have been murdered across Canada in recent decades.
“You read about it, you see it on TV, and you know, you feel bad for these people, but you don’t truly understand until you have to go through it yourself,” said Amy Paul, Erin Brooks’s sister.
“It is awful.”
A mother of four children, Brooks would have celebrated her 40th birthday this year, said Laurie Brooks.
A happy child, troubled adult
Laurie said her daughter was a happy child growing up, always smiling and finding things to preoccupy herself with.
That energy would later cause headaches for her parents, when Brooks started sneaking out of the house at night, or would lose her temper, which became worse as she got older.
Laurie said that it was after Brooks had her second child at 17 that her daughter started getting involved in “the party scene.”
“And it just spiralled out of control from there,” the mother said,
“And it wasn’t that she didn’t love her family, but she had an addiction problem, and we all know how addiction goes. You tend to wipe everything and everybody out of your life who isn’t into that addiction.”
Sitting beside her mother, Amy chimed in, adding addiction doesn’t define a person, and that her sister never involved her or other relatives in the darker side of her life.
“A lot of times we didn’t know what she was doing,” Amy said.
Forty-year-old Erin Brooks of Sitansisk (St. Mary’s First Nation) disappeared in December 2021 from the Fredericton area, and police have no leads.
Laurie said her daughter’s lifestyle could have been a factor in her disappearance, but she has no way of knowing for sure.
“When I tell you that we don’t know anything, I mean we don’t know anything,” she said.
“We wish we knew where to look or where to go, but you know, when you’re not involved in that world, that is a foreign country to us.”
Updates from police about the investigation into Brooks’s disappearance have been limited.
CBC News asked the Fredericton Police Force for an interview with Chief Martin Gaudet about the investigation, and instead received an email from spokesperson Megan Barker saying the investigation is still underway.
Looking for closure
When approached after a city council meeting earlier this year, Gaudet said he didn’t have any updates on the case, but confirmed it is being investigated as a homicide.
Laurie Brooks said she’s been happy with the work police have done on the file, adding detectives always answer when she calls.
But she and Amy are still hungry for answers, and eager to bring Brooks home, even if she’s no longer alive.
“Every day off I have, we go out searching,” Amy said. “Didn’t matter — snow, rain, whatever, up to our hips in snow, and it’s really, it’s just like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”
While Laurie doesn’t know what happened to her daughter, she said she’s sure there are people who do.
She appealed to them to do the right thing, to come forward with information in any way possible.
“I don’t care how you get the message [to us],” Laurie said.”Crime Stoppers, the Fredericton Police Department, just whoever. I don’t care. … We just want to know.
“We want to do right by her. Put her to rest.”
Erin Brooks is described as being about five feet two inches tall and 115 pounds. She has brown eyes and black hair with bangs and was last seen wearing blue jeans, a brown jacket and black boots.
Anyone with any information about her whereabouts is asked to call the Fredericton police at 506-460-2300, or Crime Stoppers at 1-800- 222-8477.
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