Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Hey, it's Nancy. Before we begin today, I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to Crime Beat early and ad-free on Amazon Music, included with Prime. A listener's note. The following episode contains coarse language, adult themes, and content of a violent and disturbing nature and may not be suitable for everyone. Listener discretion is advised.
As a journalist, specifically one who covers crime, I'm often surrounded by tragedy. A lot of people ask why I do what I do. There's a few reasons. I'm driven by investigating stories, digging up the truth, and I get satisfaction from that.
I have to admit, there's also a certain adrenaline rush from holding people accountable, knocking on offenders' doors, and shining a light in dark places. But at the center of every story are the people. Giving these people a voice fuels my purpose. So many of these victims and their families inspire me.
Today, I want to share the story of a young woman who's been through the fiercest of storms, and she's proven over and over nothing can destroy the fire within her. I think I cried that whole night, maybe for like till morning. And the next days are just a blur. I was in a space of grief where I don't really recall the months or the days that
She's a survivor and a light to whoever crosses her path. I love her for her voice of reason and her calmness and her love for her family and her brothers and the protection of her kids. She's a wonderful person and she's going to be somebody. She is somebody.
I'm Nancy Hixt, a crime reporter for Global News. Today on Crime Beat, the story of Cherry Ledesma and her daughter Tia, the girl who became a warrior. In early November 2011, Cherry Ledesma was looking forward to a fresh start. She was living in temporary housing run by a social agency.
Cherry and her common-law husband, Greg, lived in the basement and two roommates lived upstairs. She was waiting to get into a substance abuse treatment program. Cherry battled addictions most of her life and had been in treatment before, but this time she was determined to make it work. The mother of five was very close with her kids, and they regularly called and often stopped by to see her.
But for a couple days that month, no one could reach her. Her second oldest son, Marlon, thought it was strange that she wasn't answering her phone. He called his older brother, Paul, and asked him to check up on her. When he did, Cherry's common-law husband told Paul she went downtown. That wasn't uncommon, but it didn't make sense for her to stay out for more than a few hours at a time.
The weather was beginning to turn and there was already snow on the ground. The fact that Cherry had left the home to go downtown and spend some time with friends didn't really raise any alarms because the people living in that home at that time were of a transient nature. And so even though they had a place to go back to, I don't think it would have been uncommon
for any of them to disappear for a few days at a time. Go spend time with friends somewhere else and then come back. That's Calgary Police Homicide Detective Dave Sweet. If you're a regular listener to Crime Beat, you're likely familiar with him. Detective Sweet is a veteran officer and a determined investigator, well known for the compassion he shows with the families of the victims. Yeah, I remember specifically when this investigation started. It was a cold evening in November, November.
of 2011 and it was about 9 o'clock at night when I got a phone call from my staff surgeon at the time. On November 4th, Sweet was called to Cherry Ledesma's home. It all started with a call to 911. This was not the first time police had been called to this home. In fact, officers were called 37 times to that address just that year.
When investigators arrived, they went into the basement and found an ominous message on the wall. Two large fist-sized holes had been punched into the drywall and a message had been scrawled onto that drywall that said, "This is your head. Don't come back here, Cherry." But there was something worse yet to be discovered just a few feet away from that message.
What police found would change the course of a young woman's life. Tia Ledesma is the heart of today's story. So my mom, her dad was Mexican. He was a Mexican immigrant who was from the States. And then my grandmother is full Blackfoot from Six-Eleven Nation.
So my mother was half and half and she was born in Portland. My dad was from Sunchild. I know his name and that's about it. I've never met him. And my mom was a single mom. So, Siksika, which is Blackfoot, Cree on my dad's side, and then my mother was half Mexican.
So my mom is Cherry Ledesma. Her middle name is Lotus. I love her name. I love saying her name. It's really pretty. I have two older brothers and then two younger brother and younger sister. And I'm in the middle. My brother Paul is the oldest. And then there's my brother Marlon, who's a couple of years older than me.
and then myself, and then my sister is a year younger than me. My sister's name is Juanita, and Jared is the youngest. Cherry Ledesma was 16 when she had her first son. I think it was definitely a challenge for her, but she did go to school for office administration. She graduated from high school.
She was pretty determined when we were younger. Like, she wanted to, she worked full time. Cherry's kids adored her. My mom, in my memory, the picture that I have of her in my head, she's a beautiful, young, Blackfoot Mexican woman with long, wavy hair. And she always loved to laugh. She always loved to joke around.
She was very artistic. I remember being little and watching her draw and sketch and write. She had very pretty writing and just trying to copy her and the things that, trying to copy the things that she drew or how she wrote. She would draw a little cartoon native girl with long braids wearing the shawl.
And I would just, we would just sit and I would copy her drawings. As a young girl, my mom was, she loved to cook.
She was always, like I said, she was always laughing. Cherry worked hard to keep her heritage, both Mexican and indigenous, at the center of their family life. Feasts were a big thing. And then my mother also cooked a lot of Mexican food, like enchiladas, tacos. The house would have a strong smell of chili a lot of the time. So she definitely...
We definitely ate a lot of traditional foods and also a lot of Mexican foods. We would smudge, we would attend powwows, round dances. My grandmother would speak Blackfoot to us or we would hear it in our my aunties and uncles and I was taught to jingle just and fancy dance and
Yeah, so it was a part of our life when we were children. But Tia said there was also a darker side to her childhood. The other part of it was wondering where she was or why she was crying or being scared because, you know, they were drinking and I just wanted her to be with us. A lot of the times,
We would go months without seeing her. And I realize now those were the times that she was either in treatment or she was really into her drugs and alcohol at that time. So there were a lot of times when we were younger, either there would be a lot of drinking in the home or wondering where she was.
and waiting for her to come back. Another part of that was her relationships were always extremely abusive. Like I witnessed a lot of times of her getting beat up or fighting, yelling and you know the house being torn apart from an angry man and
I witnessed that a lot when we were younger. And that's something that she also struggled with, was trying to leave those violent relationships. When those violent situations happened, her older brothers took charge and made sure Tia and her two younger siblings were safe. They definitely been through some rough times with her boyfriends or their stepdad.
They knew when to run and they knew when to hide, which is something that they, that's how they would keep us safe because they already knew when something was going to happen or when something, they just knew. So they've been through it and they've seen that their whole life. You know, they, I know that they witnessed a lot of terrible things and they also had a lot of violence against themselves, but they were very protective.
They would take care of us, and they were just children themselves. Tia remembers the turning point in her home life. Well, my brother, I think he took care of us for two weeks on his own, and he was only 15 or 16 years old. That was Paul. I was nine, my sister was eight, and my little brother was four or five.
And he took care of us for a couple of weeks. You know, he was feeding us. It was summertime. And so he even took us to Stampede. And he was just young. And then I think he reached out for help. And at that time, social services was called. That day is burned into Tia's memory. I know. I have this...
That was the day her world was ripped apart.
And so I became a PGO, a permanent ward. We were put into a white lady's home and that became a permanent residence. My older brothers, they were already old enough to take care of themselves. And so they didn't come into care. And they were just young teenagers, but...
Me, my brother and my sister, thankfully we were all able to go into the same home together when we went into care. And we were there from when I was nine years old till I was 17. For a while, Tia said they were allowed to see their mother. But soon, that ended too. Pretty much after those visits with my mom, there's four or five of them over the span of like six months.
We weren't able to have any visits with any family or my mom. That was extremely painful. Going into care, I think I cried for my mom for about a year every night. And the same with my siblings. We just didn't understand why we couldn't go home because we were always either with family or on the reserve. So being apart from all of that, it's still really painful to talk about.
I've been trying to think of the right words to describe Tia. She's small in stature, but fierce in spirit. That really comes across in how she handles adversity. Tia said they were just kids and they had no idea why their mother would let them go. Forget about them. They felt abandoned. I was upset that no family had came for us. And
If they did, I never knew about it. I never, I think my auntie said that, yeah, she asked for visits and it was never accommodated by social workers. They never got back to them. A lot of my anger was with my mom because, you know, she had her addictions and as much as I loved her, as much as I wanted to be with her, I knew that her addictions were something that she struggled with and the reason why we were in care was
So it was a lot of anger and frustration, you know, just praying and wishing that she would get better for us. Tia said she took solace in having her little sister and brother with her, and her foster mother treated them well. It was a safe place. It was a good place. She traveled with us. We went to the States a lot. We went to BC a lot.
And she definitely showed us a lot of love and care. - But Tia said, though she was well cared for, something was always missing. - I think it's really difficult when Native children go into white homes because they don't know themselves what it is, right? So how are they supposed to maintain a culture that they don't know about? But yeah, it is really important when kids go into care that they at least have some culture in their life.
It was many years later before Tia saw the rest of her family. I actually ran into my brother Paul at the mall when I think I was 16. We were just kind of staring at each other and my brother and sister were with me and we're all walking and we're like, is that Paul? And it was a happy reunion because we hadn't seen him in at least seven years and
It was just a really happy moment where it was just like, well, this is our older brother. We couldn't believe it. Like, I didn't think I would see him for a long while. Like, I didn't think I would see him ever again, actually. A year later, when Tia was 17, she left her foster home and got her own apartment in
She was still technically in care until she was 18. But because she had already been working for several years, she was able to try independent living. But that transition wasn't an easy one. I was very lost when I aged out of care. I no longer belonged at the home I was at. I was pretty much on my own. And then...
And then I knew nobody. My mother was even a stranger to me. My brothers, my older brothers were strangers to me. My aunties and uncles. I think I had one cousin that she's like a sister that she never forgot me. That was one person that didn't forget me. So that one person, that one connection was able to bring me back.
Tia moved in with her aunt on Siksika Nation, which is located an hour east of Calgary and has a total population of about 7,500 members. It's estimated half of those members live there. On Siksika is where Tia finally reconnected with her mother, Cherry Ledesma. Yeah, I ran into her in town and we realized that we actually lived really close to each other. She had moved on reserve.
She was trying to get sober and living on reserve was one way to do that. She lived with her boyfriend there. It felt surreal at the beginning that I was near my mother. I felt like a nine-year-old kid again. It brought me back to, there was so much time taken from us, right? And so I just wanted to relearn who my mother was.
So every day I would walk to her house and she taught me how to fish. We would go for long walks. We would go visit her mother, my grandmother at the Elders Lodge in Siksika. I would just, we would just spend a lot of time together. And it was a really happy time to be able to be close to my mom again. And she was in a sober state.
sober place and she was at a good place in her life. After so many lost years, Tia was grateful to have her mother back, to be able to finally reconnect. It was only then that she learned why her mother disappeared all those years ago. When I asked her when I was 18, I was like, so what happened? And she just, that's all she told me is that
She went to jail and she didn't go into details of why. She told me that she loved us so much that she wanted us to have a good life and that it wasn't with her when we were younger. She knew that about herself, that she couldn't be the mother that she needed to be. And in order for her children to be safe and happy, we needed to be somewhere else. And that's
something that I didn't really accept when she told me because to me, I just wanted to be close to my mom. I just wanted to be with my mother, whether it was through the bad or through the good. I just wanted to be home. Tia was making peace with her mother, but it wasn't always smooth sailing. So when she lived down the road from me, I would constantly visit her or we would go visit my grandmother in town.
That was the time that I really got to reconnect with her, which is a really awesome gift, I think, that was given to me. But eventually she fell into her addictions. She moved back to Calgary. I would run into her here and there, you know, as an adult trying to reconnect with her. It would always be very random. And then I had children when I was 19. I had my first daughter.
She was there at the hospital. She was there at the baby shower. When she needed to be there, she would pop up and it would always surprise me. But I would always be so thankful. Because Tia and her mother were apart for so many years, Tia had so much she wanted to catch up on. But that was difficult as her mother's demons continued to rage inside her and she would go missing from time to time.
And I would constantly search for her. I would, you know, I'd ride the train through downtown and I'd just search for her. I'd look for her, hoping to run into her. In mid-October 2011, Tia had one of those random chance encounters with her mom at a local mall. Cherry was out shopping with her common-law husband, Greg Houle. It was almost Halloween and she said, let me buy...
your kids their Halloween outfits. So we walked through Marlboro Mall and she bought their Halloween outfits and he was with her. And I had an uneasy feeling around him like he was, I could tell he was an active user. So I didn't really acknowledge him or communicate with him. He made me feel very uncomfortable so
Tia said she knew her mom had been with Greg for some time. They were both struggling with addictions. They were living in a house funded by Alpha House, transitional housing, I believe. He was very rough and he looked very wild looking, very scruff. And he kind of had like, he was trying to be friendly, but it came off as very rough and rough.
I didn't feel comfortable around him with my kids. And so I kind of just, you know, ignored him and just talked with my mom. Then, a week later, at the end of October 2011, Tia got a call from her mom. She had good news to share. She sounded really, like, eager, like, happy, excited.
And she was ready. It was something that she was proud of, that she wanted to share with me. Cherry said she would be gone for about a month. She was heading into detox and then into treatment.
She wanted my address so she could write me. And I remember thinking like, "Yay, my mom, when she's done treatment, I could bring my kids around her or she can come visit." And I was pretty, I was happy that she wanted to get sober. So when Cherry disappeared a week later, her family didn't immediately worry.
When my brother first came to the house saying they didn't know where she was, I was just thinking like, "Oh, okay, she just wants to get it out of her system before she goes to detox." Then, two days later... Paul came to my house with my younger brother, JJ. My little brother had my mother's purse, and I remember looking at him thinking like, "Why do you have a woman's purse?" And I just kind of laughed and
But they both had like these very worried looks on their faces. My brother said that they had found a body at her house, but they didn't know where my mom was. Tia's uncle was at her mom's house looking for a backpack he left there. When he went into the basement, he saw a hand sticking out of a pile of laundry.
They thought it was a Halloween decoration or because Halloween was just, you know, a couple of days before. But they were spooked when they seen that hand. They were spooked. They called the cops and they I think they knew it wasn't something good. As far as they knew, Cherry was still missing and they weren't ready to accept the alternative. So when my younger brother and my oldest brother, Paul, came to the house,
They were worried and the first thing I did was grab pictures of her, you know, thinking like, okay, we have to look for her. Not even focusing on the fact that they found a body. I was just saying, okay, we need to find her. You know, she's probably downtown. We got to go look for her. And my brother, he kind of had a look like he already knew. He was just sitting on my floor looking at her picture.
It was later that night that Tia realized her mom was really gone. I was alone. My kids were sleeping. I had only been in my apartment for maybe a month, so I had no furniture. I was sitting in my empty living room with a radio. I didn't have a TV. I couldn't accept it. But when I was sitting on the living room floor, I turned on the radio and I was thinking maybe it's on the news.
about a body being found. So I switched to an AM station that has the continuous news playing. And sure enough, it came on. And the news broadcast said it was a 40-year-old woman found at the whatever block in Whitehorn. And I didn't know that they knew that it was a 40-year-old woman. I kind of like, it kind of hit me at that moment.
that it was her. It wasn't confirmed by police. It wasn't told to us that it could be her. But when it said a 40-year-old woman was found, I think I cried that whole night, maybe for like till morning. And the next days are just a blur. On November 4th, 2011, police were met with that dark message scrawled in marker on Cherry Ledesma's basement wall.
A few steps away, investigators found the body of a woman hidden in the laundry room. Yeah, she had been almost hidden in plain view. She had been covered with a lot of clothes that had been sort of piled up on top of her. Homicide detective Dave Sweet was assigned as the primary investigator. He said the woman was beaten beyond recognition. Sadly, she had been...
brutally beaten about the face. And so identification that way was very, very difficult. And we started to see evidence of a disturbance, evidence of a struggle. We saw blood in different areas of the basement, not just in the laundry room. And we found a broken, call it a stereo speaker, that had been smashed
into a number of different pieces in that laundry room near the clothing. Police tried to track down Cherry's common-law husband, but he was nowhere to be found. I mean, we have a very active homicide investigation at this point in time. There wasn't a lot of light down in the basement, and so a decision was made that we were going to begin processing the scene the following day, and that's exactly what we did. The home was sealed off as a crime scene.
In the meantime, police needed to talk to witnesses, including the two roommates who lived in the upstairs of the home. The problem was getting people to talk. I mean, one of the big challenges we have in a case like this is even just dealing with the sobriety level of the people that we're interviewing.
You know, so some people can't be interviewed right away. And even after witnesses sobered up, there were other investigative challenges. Some of the people we talked to didn't want to talk to the police. Some of the people we talked to probably held back information because they didn't want to be seen as a snitch or what have you. These cones of silence are one of them.
the trickiest things to have to navigate in any kind of a process. And then even if somebody will eventually provide that information, sign up to give us that information, getting those individuals into court to do it again on the stand takes a lot of work behind the scenes. And again, this case is probably the most complex case
that I've ever had when it came to dealing with trust and some of these other issues and getting people to court and getting people to tell their truths. Police focused their efforts on finding Gregory Houle. It turned out there was a history of violence in the home.
Neighbors at the time told Global News they saw the couple frequently fighting, with conflicts that often spilled onto the residential street. We'd get screamings from the lady especially that like would seem like she's screaming for her life almost. The woman was kind of like shoving him backwards and she was like, don't effing touch me, don't effing touch me. And I wasn't really sure what was going on. Oh, I've seen it.
smacking each other in the front sidewalk and on the street. Wow, when was that? Every day this week so far. Just seven hours into the homicide investigation, police made an arrest. And Greg Kuhl was subsequently located at about 3 a.m. on November 5th at one of the city's homeless shelters. And at the time he was found,
He was wearing clothing that had visible blood on it. And he was suffering from several injuries that were consistent with him being involved in a fight. And those injuries were deep scratch marks on both of his arms. Cherry died as a result of multiple blunt force trauma to her body. And that her death was a homicide. In this particular case, the blunt force trauma was caused by
something hard hitting Cherry multiple times. At the scene, we had found a broken piece of stereo equipment that I think was one of the primary weapons used to cause the egregious injuries to her. Police said all evidence pointed to a domestic homicide. We were able to identify, forensically,
through the two fish-shaped holes that were punched in the drywall. There was DNA, actually specifically blood, likely from the knuckles of whoever caused those holes. We found blood on the inside of the drywall that came back to belonging to Greg. We also found Cheri's blood, biological material, one of Greg's shoes. And then
of the broken up bits of wood and things that were used to, I believe, strike Cherry. We found a mixture of both Greg and Cherry's blood on one of those objects. Gregory Houle was charged with the second-degree murder of Cherry Ledesma. That's when police revealed more information about the couple's history of domestic violence.
Remember, police said they were called to the home 37 times that year. And over the past year, leading up to her death, the police had been to six different domestic-related complaints involving the couple. Police responded to the most recent domestic call involving Cherry and Gregory Houle on November 1st,
Three days before Cherry was found. Just one day before she was killed. At that time, Patty McCallum was the staff sergeant in the domestic conflict unit and spoke to the media about this case. The pattern clearly shows that alcohol abuse is one of the factors that we've seen repeatedly in this particular case with this couple.
We have six domestic-related calls. Police said the domestic conflict unit was not notified in this case. For some unknown reason, those specialized officers weren't engaged, as this wasn't considered a high-risk case when officers responded to those six domestic calls.
A spokesperson from a community help group who specifically deals with family violence prevention also spoke to the media about this case. You can't force somebody into treatment. There was no reason to charge. I mean, we certainly work with lots of mandated clients at the YWCA of Calgary. But you can give them the resources and then sometimes it's just about choices that people make.
At the time, police said they would conduct a review with several community partners who worked with the couple in an effort to find ways to better coordinate response and for ways to intervene before it's too late. Since then, the Calgary Police Service has created specialized domestic conflict response teams where a trained police officer is paired with a social worker.
These teams are notified of all domestic calls. And the goal is early intervention to try to prevent tragedies like Cherry's. In most of those cases, the couple's arguments seem to stem from or were fueled by the consumption of alcohol.
The most recent of those events occurred actually only three days prior to her murder. And it was in that particular call to police, it was initiated by a neighbor who had seen Cherry screaming for police outside of the residence. On that particular occasion, the police attended
Greg was seen getting onto a bicycle and leaving the area. And then Cherry made the decision not to talk to the police any further. Once the police attended, she went back into the home. And that was it for that particular incident. I mean, sadly, I think there's a lot of dynamics that are at play when people are in abusive relationships. And there's a number of factors that lead people to make decisions differently.
in relation to how they want to respond to the police, how much involvement they want the police to have. I think it's fair to say that in a lot of abusive relationships that the abuse partner will often minimize or even lie for the offender or their actions. And that is likely because there's, again, those very complicated, complex dynamics that we do not understand.
are present at that moment that the police attend. And it leaves the police in a difficult position because they're left to try and ascertain what has occurred and determine if a crime has occurred, but also identify what evidence, if a crime has occurred, what evidence would the victim be able to provide in a court.
And so these cases, sadly, sometimes, although we may be aware of domestic issues and domestic problems inside a residence, it is very, very difficult to solve all of those problems in one call for service.
Just a few months after Cherry Ledesma was killed, I met Tia along with three of her siblings for the first time. Global News has learned that a man charged with the second-degree murder of his common-law spouse has been granted bail. Nancy Hicks reports. It was a very strong woman. She was...
She meant a lot to us. They lost their mother nearly six months ago, but the pain is still very real. Cherry Ledesma was brutally murdered, beaten to death, dying of blunt force trauma. Now to make matters worse, Cherry's children have just learned the man accused of killing her has been granted bail. Why would a judge grant him bail? Why wasn't anything done to prevent him from getting out? He's basically going to get out.
free until his trial. Like, that's not right. Cherry was killed last November. Her common-law husband, Gregory Sanders Houle, is charged with second-degree murder. When he went to jail, I was glad they got him. I thought it was an open-and-shut case. Police believe Cherry was dead inside her home for at least 36 hours before she was found. Nobody said anything. They just hid her body. And then my family found her. But this wasn't an open-and-shut case.
In the end, Gregory Houle stood trial for manslaughter. Tia attended that trial. She became a voice for her mother. Exhausting and painful to hear all that happened to her. To be sitting in the same room as someone who killed your mom is just...
During the trial, it was revealed Gregory Houle threatened to murder Cherry Ledesma with a metal pole one week before he followed through with his threats and killed her. Defense argued it was rational to conclude that someone other than Houle committed the crime.
But the judge found, given the totality of the evidence, the only reasonable inference to be drawn from the facts in this case was that Houle was responsible. Just over two years after Cherry was killed, her common-law husband was convicted of manslaughter. I miss her and it's...
She didn't deserve what happened to her. Nobody deserves any of that. You know, she was a beautiful woman and all people have like their issues, but my mom was a beautiful person and she didn't deserve to leave this world in the way she did.
A year later, in 2014, Houle was finally sentenced. A lot of emotion in a Calgary courtroom as a young woman confronted the man who killed her mother. Terry Ledesma was killed by her common-law husband, who will receive his sentence on Friday. Nancy Hicks has the details from the courthouse.
Cherry Ledesma's life ended violently. She was beaten to death, her body hidden and not found for days in the home she shared with her husband, Gregory Houle. There are graphic details that haunt the five children Ledesma left behind. It's something that affects us every day. Like, it's a struggle to move forward. I think for me, it's just knowing the extent of her injuries as she died, the last moments of her life and...
You know, all those details are going to haunt us for the rest of our life. Tia Ledesma read her victim impact statement in court, never looking at the man who killed her mom, wanting the court to know how much she misses her. It doesn't get easier. You know, that was our mother. It doesn't get easier. If anything, it just gets harder. Three years is a long time to have this weight on the family's shoulders. It was really hard to speak today.
In the end, the judge sentenced Greg Houle to 10 years in prison. According to the Parole Board of Canada, during his time in prison, Houle demonstrated a lack of remorse for his actions and instead presented himself as a victim.
His criminal history dates back to 1984. He has 20 prior convictions, including one for spousal assault. Though the board noted many similar domestic charges for assault and assault causing bodily harm were either withdrawn, dismissed, or stayed in court. The parole board said during his incarceration, he completed all recommended programming, including AA and NA.
In August 2019, eight years after he killed Cherry Ledesma, Greg Houle was granted day parole and a year later, full parole. At that time, the board noted he suffered from chronic health issues and was preparing for an organ transplant. Losing her mother caused unimaginable grief for Tia. I felt like I was that child.
You know, I was a nine-year-old kid again, crying for her mom, you know? You know, I always thought in my head, like, okay, when I'm older, I'll know my mom. When I'm older, I'll be close to my mom. But this time, it was like, it was real that I would never, never see her again. Tia feels robbed of another chance at having her mother in her life.
Cherry Ledesma was killed less than three years after she reconnected with Tia. I was in a space of grief where I don't really recall the months or the days. It was something that after about a year and a half, I thought, you know what my kids need? My kids need a mom, a happy mom. My kids need a joyful mom. And
I didn't want to hang on to the anger. I had to wake up from the grief. It's about a year after she passed, I signed up for school and I really thought, you know, I have to honor my mom. I have to make her proud. And that's what really pushed me to move past that grief.
Tia attended the Riel Institute, a nonprofit society that provides education to Indigenous people with emphasis on cultural knowledge, cultural pride, and building self-esteem. Through this education, Tia was able to see her mother and the path she was on in a whole different light. It's, you know, for Native people, by Native people,
So I thought, you know, this would be a good way to transition back into regular school, to regular education. So going there, I got my child and youth certificate, but at the same time, I learned a lot about my history. And something that was not taught to me in school was not taught to me by family or, you know, it's just something that is not taught in mainstream society.
But it was a huge part of, you know, a step into healing. Before going through the Riel Institute, Tia didn't realize what her mother had been through or the intergenerational trauma she experienced. It totally opened my eyes to the fact that my anger was directed at
at the wrong person because where she was brought to in life was not her own doing. People have their choices in life, but I think my mom had so much pain, so much
traumatic experiences that stem from growing up in care, that stem from her mother not being there. And, you know, and then I think about what my grandma went through. It's crazy to me that I had a lot of guilt afterward for being angry with my mother, you know, my eyes being open to the fact that I come from
Tia's grandma on her mother's side was born on the Siksika First Nation. She was one of thousands of First Nations, Métis and Inuit children from across Canada ripped from her family and put into a residential school. She was forced to attend a government-funded church-run school.
Many of the kids sent to residential schools suffered severe sexual, physical, and emotional abuse. The goal was to assimilate these children. They weren't allowed to speak their indigenous languages or practice their cultural traditions. Yeah, they were successful. In my family, it was definitely stolen from us. I should know Blackfoot. And, um...
If my mother was raised with her Mexican family, her heritage, I wouldn't know Spanish. So those would be my two home languages, but no, I don't know either of them. I think I was called an apple when I aged out of care, which is like, I have, you know, from the outside I look native, but on the inside I was a little white girl. Yeah.
I think it was one of my teachers when I went to the school. I was trying to finish high school on reserve and one of the teachers called me an apple. I carried a lot of anger growing up in foster care. So once I learned about residential school and realized that I was a part of a cycle, my grandmother, you know, was unable to, she was not given the tools to parent. She was not taught our traditional ways.
And that was passed on to my mother, which was passed on to me. And the language and just sad that you haven't been around that or exposed to that or taught that. But learning about it really opened my eyes to the reasons why I don't speak my language, the reason why I don't know my culture the way that I really wish I did.
And it is because that was stolen from us. That was stolen many generations ago. Tia is the third generation that she's aware of in her family to suffer from this trauma. First, her grandmother in the residential school system that was passed on to her kids, including Cherry.
Then, Cherry and her siblings suffered further trauma as they became victimized in another dark time in Canadian history, the 60s scoop. Cherry was one of thousands of First Nations, Métis, and Inuit children from across the country who were ripped from their homes in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.
She was taken from her family by child welfare workers and placed with a white foster care family. My mother was raised in foster care at a very young age, and I was raised in foster care at a young age. So it's kind of a cycle of, I'm confident to say that it's from residential school, the intergenerational trauma.
At 15, Cherry ran away from her foster home in rural Alberta. Without proper support and the ability to cope, she ended up in a spiral of drug and alcohol abuse. Since then, Tia's entire family has been impacted in different ways. She believes that intergenerational trauma continues to play out for her family. Just a few years after his mother was killed,
Tia's older brother Marlon killed a fellow inmate while he was incarcerated. It was a grisly killing that was captured on surveillance video as it took place inside a cell at the Calgary Remand Center. Marlon Ledesma was convicted of second-degree murder in the case. His sister doesn't minimize his horrific actions.
But she also sees him from a different perspective. He is a product of the environment he was brought up in, in the way that he's been treated his whole life. I think that's very, it comes out, it has come out in his actions, the way he's
He's been brought up. I remember my brother when I was young. He took care of me. He was happy. We would joke around a lot. He always took care of me. He had a very compassionate side to him that he was very protective of those he loved. But at the same time, he's been through so much.
He's gone through things that I can't even imagine going through as a young boy, like as a young child. That him growing up in that environment and then having to live in the society that we do, it's like, how could he not turn out the way he has? You know, he hasn't got the help that he needed when he was a child, when he was an adolescent.
as a young man, he didn't get the help that he needed. He was written off, you know? And I think had people been more compassionate toward him as a child, had he had more love, had he experienced not being beat up and that violence when he was younger, I don't think he would be the person he is today if he had that love and that compassion that he needed when he was younger.
because I knew him. I knew him when he was innocent, when he was a child, when he was a protective younger older brother. That's the person that I know. Jail is something that has not been kind to him at all. His mental state, when he did what he did,
When he's violent, that's not the person that he is. You know, I think that drugs have really rewired his brain, have changed the person that he is. And I haven't been able to talk to him in about a year or so. And when I do, he's not the same brother that I knew.
Tia works hard to stop the cycle of pain that is often reflected in patterns of violence and addictions in her family. I think different people have different reactions when they have that type of trauma of seeing their family struggle with addictions. You either...
You either live totally opposite from it or you live that same exact lifestyle. I think there's those two avenues that people take. For myself, once I had my children, once I became pregnant, I completely stopped drinking because I did struggle with it as a teenager a little bit.
But once I became a mom, I thought, you know what? I'm not going to put my kids through the same that I've been through. There's no way that I'm going to expose them to even a little bit of that. You know, I didn't want to continue it. I thought this is something that was so painful for me that there's no way that I could ever do that to my children. Still, Tia knows she's been impacted by the trauma she survived.
That includes attending the trial for her mother's killer. So after I went to Real Institute, I signed up for the youth justice program at Bow Valley College. I actually have one more semester to get my youth justice diploma. That was in 2013. And the reason why I dropped out was because my mother's trial was during that my first
semester at Bow Valley College. So trying to be there at the trial and then also trying to focus on school was really difficult. It kind of brought me back to when she first passed away. Because when you go to the trial, you learn about all of her injuries. You learn about all the incidents that happened up until that point. You learn about the man who did it. You learn about
The fact that her worker came to the house looking for her to bring her the detox and she wasn't there. All of that was really difficult to learn about, that I couldn't finish school. I am now a admin support for Children's Services.
And I've been there for about five years now. A social service office for 60-Grad children specifically. It's for kids that come into care that are 60-Grad here in the city. So they don't go into the mainstream social services system. We have our own children's service office and our own homes and our own foster homes that we try to
try to keep them managed by the nation. Well, when I first went there, it was kind of surreal for me because, you know, my file was actually there at Siksika Children's Services and then to now be working for them, it was really strange to me. But I'm glad that I can work for my nation. It does feel like I am able to give back in a way. I could really see
that I had a different perspective about looking at these families that come in and really treating them with compassion and knowing the pain and the struggle of trying to get your kids back or wanting to see your children or your grandchildren.
So that's something that I feel very deeply for people that have to deal with children's services because it is a struggle. And then there's the daily stresses of dealing with racism. It was something more that I had to struggle with as a young mom. Because I do look so young, I would get a lot of looks and a lot of like,
older people muttering under their breath about, you know, being Native with young kids. So it is something that I've gotten used to. It's an everyday thing, you know. It's just a normal thing. We walk into, like, say, shoppers, I'm going to be followed.
Tia believes education can be a powerful tool to help us understand and empathize with those who suffered through a dark time in our country's history. I think more people should be educated about it. I think Alberta is very conservative and conservative.
maybe that part of history they either don't care about or it hasn't been taught to them. So I think that's why racism is such a problem here and all over Canada is because they don't know the history.
I think that everyone should learn about it because it is a part of Canadian history and I think it would broaden a lot of people's perspectives on Native people. There has been a lot more awareness about it, but that needs to grow, definitely.
And same with learning about the missing and murdered Indigenous women in Canada. People just putting that effort in to at least read about it, learn about it, hear someone speak about it, you know? I think that would bring us closer in ways that not to be so judgmental or rush to conclusions that
or write them off as, you know, a drunk, write them off as an addict. Tia's mother is one of a staggering number of Indigenous women who have been murdered in Canada. According to the Assembly of First Nations, Indigenous women and girls are five times more likely to experience violence than any other population in Canada. And this violence tends to result in more serious harm.
I'm going to share a few statistics gathered during the 2016 National Roundtable on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. Indigenous women like Cherry make up 16% of all female homicide victims and 11% of missing women, even though Indigenous people make up 4.3% of the population of Canada.
Indigenous women are three times more likely than non-Indigenous women to be victims of violence. But to Tia and her family, Cherry was much more than a statistic. I want them to know that she really is
fought hard and she was a very beautiful person. I want people to know that her life wasn't disposable and that she didn't deserve what she got. She didn't deserve to be beaten to death. You know, she was a beautiful mother. She was loved by our family and her death hit us really hard.
Detective Dave Sweet witnessed firsthand the impact Cherry's death had on her family. What I'll always remember about this family was that as siblings, they always came back together to support one another. And the person I felt that was always at the center of this was this little 5'2", 100-pound soaking wet girl, daughter to Cherry,
sister to the boys and her other sister. She was like a beacon of light, really, for a family that at times, you know, had some turbulence for sure. But she seemed to be somebody that people always went back to. And that's something I'll always, I have great respect for Tia in relation to being able to create an environment
become this matriarch of this family for her brother specifically and her sister and a place where they could go when they needed to go somewhere and feel loved and safe. And so, um, and she took that on and, you know, I love her for her voice of reason and her, her calmness and her, her love for her family and her brothers and, and, um,
and the protection of her kids. She's just a wonderful person and she's going to be somebody. She is somebody. And she's going to continue to build and build on that over the rest of her life. And I really, really appreciate that about her. Detective Sweet has written a book about the lessons he's learned during his time as a police officer. In that book, there's a section specifically about Tia. Most would have written her off as a lost cause.
Several of her family members had either been murdered or were murderers themselves. Throughout her life, she had been surrounded by people, afflicted by alcohol, drug abuse, and the hell those demons bring. The deck was stacked against her to live a very different life if she chose to follow the script others expected of her. She didn't. She chose her own way. Dave has been so kind. Like, he's been awesome right from the start.
Right away after he became involved with the case, he treated us with so much respect and so much compassion that I felt really comfortable talking to him and going to him with all of my specific questions about, you know, forensics and court and trial. He's someone that you can really tell he cares about the people that he's helping.
And yeah, that's had a lasting effect because I even, I still have his number on my phone. So I know I could call him when I need to, which is really awesome to have. Tia works hard to make sure her family's history and culture will not be forgotten by her own kids. So I try to bring them to, you know, powwows. I'm trying to learn my language.
as best as I can, when I can. And, you know, we smudge every day. We talk about, I've taught them to pray, you know, talking about when you need a creator, he's there for you. You know, speaking to my kids, praying with them and telling them about, because I've even told my kids about residential school. I think it's something that, it's something that
I feel I should have learned as a youth, you know? And for me, it's also a learning experience because since I wasn't raised with it and my family's not very traditional, it's something that I really have to reach out for from the community and try to be a part of.
Tia has always held on to the drawings her mother did with her. Her favorite is the one she described earlier of that little girl with long braids wearing a shawl. When she looks at that picture, she's reminded of a time before her own innocence was stolen. And now, she draws with her own kids.
as she inspires them to become warriors like her. Because I really want a different life for my kids. Thank you for joining me and listening to Cherry and Tia's story. Crime Beat is written and produced by me, Nancy Hixt, with producer Dila Velasquez. Audio editing and sound design is by Rob Johnston. Special thanks to photographer-editor Danny Lantella for his work on this episode.
And thanks to Chris Bassett, the Acting VP of National and Network News for Global News. I would love to have you tell a friend about this podcast, and you can help me share these important stories by rating and reviewing Crime Beat on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen.
You can find me on Twitter at Nancy Hixt, on Facebook at Nancy Hixt Crime Beat, and I'd love to have you join me for added content on Instagram at nancy.hixt. That's N-A-N-C-Y dot H-I-X-T. Thanks again for listening. Please join me next time.