BEST LAWYER IN ATLANTA FOR PRODUCTS LIABILITY

By Randy Boswell, Canwest News Service
October 24, 2009

They disappear from small towns and big cities, from native reserves in the north and affluent suburbs in the south. They drift away and they abruptly vanish. And they leave, in their wake, broken-hearted families, confounded investigators and gaping holes in the communities where they grew up, forged friendships, held jobs, raised children.

At this moment in Canada, there are 1,559 missing women on file with the Canadian Police Information Centre, a national case-tracking database maintained at the RCMP's Ottawa headquarters.

The number sheds only a partial light on this dark story. It doesn't include the lost or stolen girls under the age of 18 who may have lived to become missing women. It doesn't account, anymore, for those who were once missing but have since been proven dead.

It doesn't embrace women who are gone but not reported missing.

Yet great depths of misery and mystery underlie even this imperfect figure. The stories of Canada's lost women — enough to equal the population of a small town, or the entire staff of a large urban hospital — would fill many mournful volumes.

The stories include some particularly shocking narratives in which a multitude of the missing disappear from a single area — such as B.C.'s "Highway of Tears," a lonely stretch of road between Prince Rupert and Prince George where five of those women were last seen and 13 others are known to have been murdered.

A high-profile search in late August for the remains of Nicole Hoar — one of Hwy. 16's 18 unsolved cases — sparked extensive news coverage and prompted some nationwide soul-searching, at least briefly, about Canada's missing women.

Then, within days, came an overdue pledge by Manitoba RCMP and Winnipeg city police to more closely collaborate in probing a series of disappearances and deaths of aboriginal women in that province.

Similar concentrations of missing or murdered women in Alberta and Saskatchewan were noted, too, along with the single most horrific chapter in the whole sorrowful saga: the dozens of vanished women from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside linked to the predatory B.C. pig farmer Robert Pickton.

But there are tears staining village streets, rural sideroads and inner-city avenues across the country. No province or territory is beyond the scope of a tragedy that encompasses every corner of Canada and which — for all of the individual instances of anguish — is made especially plain with a single, breathtaking number: 1,559.

There are thousands of missing men in the country — more than 5,000, in fact, are listed at CPIC — but the spotlight has turned to Canada's lost women because of the clusters of disappearances throughout the West and the sense that predatory men lurk behind the grim statistics.

Even 1,559 strikes Gladys Radek as a low estimate.

A member of the Gitksan Nation of northern B.C. who now lives in Vancouver, Radek has emerged as a leading voice for the lost. It's an angry voice, and the word "racism" rolls easily from her tongue as she discusses the pain of her own family's loss and the disproportionate toll among aboriginal communities like hers.

But the 59-year-old activist, now studying aboriginal law at a Vancouver native college, has called for governments, police agencies and the public to devote more attention to all of Canada's missing women — "red, black, white and yellow," as she puts it — with greater investigative resources to solve existing cases and strengthened social services to prevent new ones.

"It pissed me off that these women were going missing without anybody saying or doing anything about it," says Radek, recalling her gathering awareness of the crisis in the wake of her own niece's unexplained disappearance in September 2005 along the Highway of Tears.

Tamara Chipman — 22 at the time, and the mother of a two-year-old boy — was hitchhiking outside Prince Rupert when she vanished.

"She was just beginning her life," says Radek. "Tamara was a beautiful, spunky girl."

The tragedy sparked a vision. Radek imagined a cross-Canada pilgrimage linking families and communities across the country struggling to cope with missing and murdered women.

Last year, with a Vancouver-to-Ottawa trek she called Walk4Justice, Radek's vision was realized, drawing widespread media coverage and galvanizing public awareness of Canada's lost women.

The number 4 in the name "covers all the races, and all four directions," says Radek. "Before we did that walk, there wasn't really that much attention paid to the missing and murdered women. That's when the families started coming together more and more.

"It was a pretty powerful journey."

Earlier this year, Radek organized a second Walk4Justice between Vancouver and Prince Rupert to spotlight the suffering of families — including her own — who've lost loved ones along the Highway of Tears.

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ranger RX- front of subject - key light- softlbox - f/5.6

quadra rx - right of subject and for background - fill light - background light -with snoot - lowest power

fill card subject left.

On Christmas, one of my photo enthusiast relatives brought over all his camera gear to take some pictures for fun. I would say equivalent to 20k. Needless to say, I immediately started drooling and playing with his gear because a lot of it was stuff I can’t afford. For instance, the Elinchrom Quadra RX kit, the Einchrom Ranger RX kit, and all the studio fixings you can think off. So after awhile, when he was done shooting the family, I decided that I would try to use this expensive equipment. I inserted Heidi for some shots, and this is when Mr. Hum (my brother-in-law) started to put on boxing gloves and stepped into the line of fire. I think he also had many beers because his face was really red.

Personally, I think this equipement had too much power even dialed fully down for my style. I prefer strobes cause they are smaller and less combersome. But Rangers would be nice for that over powering the sun look.