Questions still remain as to what exactly happened to 20-year-old Brennan Ahenakew the night he went missing on the Ahtahkakoop First Nation in early May.
His remains were extracted from a burnt out vehicle on May 11 and the RCMP says it does not consider Ahenakew’s death suspicious.
However, his mother Lisa Johnstone says she is convinced some sort of foul play was involved.
“You know that gut feeling,” she asks? “You know it’s never wrong. It’s never wrong. And I knew right away and I tried to tell them (police), after they pulled me away from my son’s car, where he was and what happened. And he was in a fight with somebody.”
Johnstone says she also believes the RCMP has badly mishandled the investigation to date.
In particular, she says cannot understand why police were aware of a burning vehicle on the reserve around 10 a.m. May 10 but waited until the next day to conduct a full investigation and extraction of Ahenakew’s remains.
“I’ve seen what was left of my son. I’ve seen the condition his body was in. I know exactly how he looked. I can picture it right now in my mind. And there’s no way in hell that they can say, ‘Oh, Brennan didn’t have any stab wounds. Brennan didn’t have any bruises.’ Brennan didn’t have any of this because they couldn’t tell because he was so badly burned. All they could tell me was Brennan wasn’t shot.”
Johnstone says Ahenakew was not a big drinker and didn’t do drugs but believes he may have fallen in with the wrong crowd on the night in question and it ended up proving fatal.
Friends and family of Ahenakew are offering a $5,000 reward for anyone willing to come forward with information that may lead to an arrest in his death.
The reward has been raised from $2,000.
(PHOTO: Brennan Ahenakew. Photo courtesy Facebook.)