On the morning of February 14, 2022, my sister Christie and I walked into the Abbotsford Police Department in British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. It was four months since the last time we had been there clutching a court-ordered warrant that we hoped would save our mom Donna’s life. We believed that, as a psychiatric nurse, she knew how to convince authorities she had the capacity to choose a medically assisted death, even though she had mental illness of her own.
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Now, we were back in the same building with binders of evidence: medical records, notes from Vital Statistics, excerpts from the Criminal Code, and printouts of medical assistance in dying (MAID) legislation that indicated her death—that she had gone ahead with, on October 29, 2021, at the age of sixty-one—had likely been approved in violation of federal law.
After a few minutes, a constable came out to meet us. We opened the binders on our laps, flipping to the sections we had marked, pointing out the parts that didn’t make sense—the gaps, the inconsistencies, the pieces we couldn’t reconcile. A physician who had said she wasn’t terminal just days before another approved her for MAID. Documented concerns about depression and suicide, sitting alongside assessments that deemed her capable. Timelines that didn’t just feel incomplete—they felt impossible.
He listened carefully, then asked if he could take one of the binders to show a colleague. We handed it over. When he returned, he asked if we could set up a time next week to be formally interviewed. The date was set for February 22 to give them time to review our documents.
While we waited, we began building a website, a place to document everything we were uncovering and share our mom’s story publicly. We posted it on social media, not knowing who might find it or what would come of it.
When we returned to the police station the following week, Christie and I checked in and then were seated in different rooms. The interview room I was taken into was bare. A two-way mirror stretched across one side. I caught myself glancing at it, wondering if someone was standing on the other side, watching, listening.
When the officer sat down across from me, I started again—walking through it piece by piece. The timeline. The MAID approval. The parts that didn’t line up. A family doctor refusing to support MAID, warning our mom’s mental health needed to be treated first. A psychiatrist questioning her insight and how she was presenting her symptoms. And then—within days—approval anyway. Saying it out loud, in that room, made it feel different. Like we had crossed into something we couldn’t step back from.
When the interview was finished, the constable left me for a few minutes to check on my sister and the other constable in the room beside me. When we all reconvened, we were surprised that they didn’t dismiss our story. Instead, they told us they believed there was enough evidence to move forward.
They were officially opening an investigation. We didn’t know it then, but our mom’s case became the first known MAID death in Canada to be investigated by police. It was time to go to the media.
When Christie and I first heard about MAID, in those days right before our mom died, one of the only stories we could find was a piece by medical journalist Avis Favaro, about a man named Alan Nichols who had died by MAID in Chilliwack General Hospital, the same hospital our mom was released from hours before her death. Her name had stayed with us, so while the police investigation moved slowly in the background, we reached out. She responded immediately.
We set up a phone interview, and over the following weeks, we went back and forth by email—sending her all our documents. She reached out to the physicians involved for comment. Around the same time, we were contacted by Trudo Lemmens, a leading health law scholar who had been publicly raising concerns about the expansion of MAID in Canada. He had come across our website and reached out to offer his condolences—and his concern.
We were still trying to make sense of what had happened and were now speaking with both a national journalist and an expert who saw patterns we were only beginning to understand. We connected with him in early March, and by mid-March, we had put him in touch with the investigative team.
The constable we first met was assigned to the file. He was compassionate, curious, and increasingly troubled. He saw what we saw: missing diagnoses, unclear timelines, and contradictions between what was written and what was documented. No clear terminal illness. Active concerns about her mental state. And medical opinions that shifted dramatically in a matter of days.
Early on, he asked what outcome we wanted from all of this. Christie and I had the same goal, but our answers weren’t quite the same. While Christie was focused on justice—she wanted the doctors and assessors involved to be held accountable—I wanted legislative change to ensure this couldn’t happen to someone else. At the time, we believed those things were the same, that pursuing justice through the legal system would set a precedent, that it would force the system to correct itself.
