The group includes academics and lawyers who, in their spare time, have entered the names of missing or murdered Canadians, hoping to shed light on unsolved murders and stories of missing people.
Sasha Reid was rattled by the unexpected death of a high school friend, overcome by the realization that someone who had been a part of her life was gone.
“I was struck by this feeling of: ‘I knew her. We went to school together, we walked beside each other.'”
She wanted to find a way to commemorate this young woman. So she started a database of missing people and unsolved murders in Canada.
It’s a choice that might seem odd to many, but not Reid.
At that time, in 2016, she was a University of Toronto PhD student in developmental psychology who was already compiling a massive database on Canadian serial killers, the focus of her doctoral dissertation. Creating a new missing-and-murdered database, Reid thought, would be a break from her daily research into serial homicide.
Next week in Part 2 of this feature, we will meet some of the B.C. victims in the database.
