Cree mother in Yellowknife not notified of son's death in Alberta for 8 days

Sitting in her Yellowknife office last July, Yvette Schreder was given an odd message: someone from the Alberta Medical Examiner's office was trying to reach her.

Hours later, when the mother of four finally got through to someone, she was nonchalantly told the body of her 30-year-old son, Christopher was ready to be picked up, his autopsy complete.

Schreder didn't even know he was dead.

"She [the medical examiner] started talking about him and I just said, 'Where is my son and what's going on?' and she said 'Has nobody contacted you yet?' and I said 'No, what is going on? Where is he?'" 

Schreder said the medical examiner was also in shock to find that no one had told her about her son's death, which had happened eight days earlier.

"She said, 'This has never happened to me before. I'm sorry to tell you that your son passed away.'"

Christopher Mailloux-Schreder is the fourth Indigenous person in the last two months whose family has come forward saying they were not immediately notified of the death. 

The Inuit family of Tara Niptanatiak learned in February that she had been buried by the Alberta government in a municipal cemetery 2,000 kilometres south of her hometown of Cambridge Bay, Nunavut. The Cree family of Candice Wheeler didn't find out that she had been buried in Calgary until months later. And earlier this month, the Inuit family of Daniel Saunders learned that he had died and been buried in a Laval, Que., cemetery in 2018. 

"He wasn't someone nobody cared about," Schreder said of her son Christopher.

"He had a lot of people that cared about him and a lot of people that loved him. He was our son, brother, uncle, dad. That was really hard to take, that nobody thought he was worth letting us know.

Christopher was born and raised in the Northwest Territories and went to school in both Yellowknife and Hay River. In his early 20s, after getting his welding certificate, he moved to Alberta.

"He was a daredevil. He always did everything full throttle. He was either go big or go home, that's how he did everything," Schreder said.

"He had a really big heart. He really loved people. He loved his family… He always cared for everybody."

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Schreder said Christoper began using opioids. She said he had a hard time getting into treatment, and when he did finally get in, he struggled.