For immediate release: Thursday, September 19, 2024
Vancouver, BC – Many questions emerge as Battered Women’s Support Services (BWSS) joins members of Afro-Latino community in Metro Vancouver, Canada and in Buenaventura, Columbia in condemning the Surrey RCMP killing of a young Afro-Latina mother.
The Independent Investigations office of BC (IIO BC) has been called in following an incident where one woman died after being shot by a police officer. The Surrey RCMP says it responded to reports of a disturbance at a home shortly after 4:30 a.m. Thursday. When officers arrived, they found a woman had barricaded herself in a room with a young child while holding what police believe was a weapon.
The woman has been identified on social media and according to family, friends and community members who knew her they are shocked and recall her personality as calm, kind, caring. Many commented on her as a mother describing her as a wonderful mother who would never harm her one-and-half year old. Most of the commentary has been to question the actions of the RCMP.
BWSS has learned that the young mother was accessing support services while working hard to create a new life in Canada. According to BWSS sources, the woman had been expressing concerns about her intimate relationship and was seeking interventions to help change the situation. It has been disclosed that the woman had been inquiring about accessing BC Housing to live independently of her intimate partner.
There are many questions – for instance as a newcomer, we know the woman spoke Spanish:
- Did the RCMP provide an interpreter or were their commands to her in a language she was not proficient in?
- Did the woman even know they were police and what they were doing there?
- Was there a history of intimate partner violence?
- Was the woman barricaded as a safety measure to protect her from other people in the house?
- Was this young mother protecting her child?
- Who called 911?
- Did the woman think that the police were there to harm her or her child such as removing her one-and-half year old from her care?
- Why were the paramedics onsite prior to the killing?
- Were police cameras deployed and if so, will the police bodycam footage be made available?
- Can the IIO be trusted, and will their investigation be transparent?
It is unacceptable that the RCMP would use lethal violence with a young mother barricaded with her child when they are trained to use the least lethal option when dealing with difficult situations.
All too often, we have witnessed police escalate situations to the point where they believe they must use lethal violence and then lethal violence is justified. Today in 2024, many in the community expect that policing agencies would use skills in de-escalation and would seek to use those skills to prevent lethal violence especially with a young mother with her child.
The community workers who supported her, her family, her friends, the town she came from are in pain and devastated. Over the next days and weeks there is much to do in the search for answers.
Source: Facebook
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/video/c2997040-woman-shot-dead-by-rcmp-in-surrey
We are seeking a new life in Canada, chasing a dream that for each of us is our own version of the American dream. But we find ourselves facing a reality that tears our souls apart as it consumes us, and we put all our strength into moving forward, picking up the pieces of our shattered dreams with each blow, and putting them back together to keep going. We watch our family fight alongside us, doing everything possible and impossible not to let them down, not to see them sad or suffering, with the firm hope that tomorrow everything will be better—or at least, trying to convince ourselves that it will be. We must gather strength, or at least pretend that we have it, and swallow our pain so that perhaps our minds will believe that we are strong enough to keep going and give us more breath for another day.
Everyone cries for justice, and how wonderful it would be if it arrived—but after the damage is done? Can it be repaired? I believe not. This baby will no longer see her mother, and this woman will never dream again of things getting better each day, or at least each month. It is painful, irreparable damage; all that’s left is to reflect, keep silent, gather a little more strength, and continue on.
To many questions without answers in a case that seems to be a simple policy’s over power and violence against an afro-Colombian woman.
We as a Colombian community want answers and justice and we will move our activism to seek the truth.
This case in which a young mother and her young daughter were victims of such injustice cannot go unpunished. As a mother I can’t not imagine the damage and pain that this cowardly act on the part of the Surrey police caused to a little girl who was left an orphan, I also expressed my rage for the insensitive and cowardly way the police manathe situation, I see with terror and also with sadness as a victim of domestic violence in the past that we cannot trust the authorities anymore, my most sincere condolences to the family of Vanessa Renteria Valencia.🙏😢
This case in which a young mother and her young daughter were victims of such injustice cannot go unpunished. As a mother I can’t not imagine the damage and pain that this cowardly act on the part of the Surrey police caused to a little girl who was left an orphan, I also expressed my rage for the insensitive and cowardly way the police managed the situation, I see with terror and also with sadness as a victim of domestic violence in the past that we cannot trust the authorities anymore, my most sincere condolences to the family of Vanessa Renteria Valencia.
I honestly wish Canada would bring back the death penalty. Criminal actions in our communities need to be dealt with harshly. Are we becoming Americans where we shoot first and ask questions afterwards. God damn it I am mad. I sincerely hope the cop who murdered this women meets the same demise she did. Murderers must be killed. Prisons are a waste of money.