Step-grandmother of missing N.S. kids recalls hearing their voices, followed by 'nothing'
CBC
Janie Mackenzie was asleep in her trailer when she awoke to the sound of her dog barking, a telltale sign her two young step-grandchildren were out playing on a swingset in the backyard.
She said she heard Lilly and Jack Sullivan's voices. Her bedroom is only a few steps away.
"After that, I heard nothing," said Mackenzie of the morning of May 2, when the two children disappeared from the property in Lansdowne Station, a sparsely populated community in Nova Scotia's Pictou County.
The next thing she did hear was her son, Daniel Martell, yelling the children's names.
A short time later, she emerged from the trailer to find the children's mother, Malehya Brooks-Murray, standing in the driveway with her one-year-old daughter on her hip.
Brooks-Murray told her the children were missing, recalled Mackenzie, and had been gone for about 20 minutes.
"I closed the door, got my boots on, came out here, ran up in the woods," Mackenzie said in an interview outside of her trailer. It is the first time CBC News has been given access to the property from which the children went missing.
Mackenzie said she was speaking to her brother on the phone for about two minutes at 8:48 a.m. local time and then dozed off before being awoken by the dog's barking, so the children went missing sometime after that.
What followed was days of extensive searches of the property and surrounding woods that turned up little evidence, aside from two boot prints and a piece of a blanket. Over the past 11 weeks, nearly a dozen RCMP units — including major crimes — have been working on the case, but have released few details about what may have happened to Lilly, 6, and Jack, 4.
Mackenzie has decided to share her side of the story in the hopes of bringing more clarity to what transpired that morning and to help dispel the flurry of rumours that have been circulating online.
"I blame myself for not getting up that morning to see the kids because ... this would have never happened," she said through tears.
Mackenzie described the scene on her property — where she has lived for 26 years — as chaotic on that first day of the disappearance as RCMP officers, search and rescue officials and reporters descended upon the rural community.
Two years before, Martell and Brooks-Murray came to live there with Jack and Lilly, whose biological father had chosen a few years prior not to be a part of their lives. Soon after, Martell and Brooks-Murray welcomed their daughter.
Mackenzie said she gave the young family the mobile home and she started living in a small RV. She built the wooden swingset in the backyard, which she outfitted with a blue slide and sandbox.
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