For nearly three months, Mary Jane Mbaruk has lain awake at night wondering where her 21-year-old son Brian Mbaruk is.
The mother from East Vancouver last saw her son on Nov. 18, 2011.
Vancouver police said Brian was last seen that day on a bus heading to Grouse Mountain. It’s believed he was going hiking for the day, his mother said Thursday, explaining that she reported him missing the next night when he didn’t turn up.
Before Brian left he laid clothes out for work, and added eggs to her shopping list, she recalled.
A thorough search of the region around the Grouse Mountain area by North Shore Search and Rescue turned up nothing.
“There’s a uniqueness to this kind of grief,” Mbaruk said.
Not knowing what has become of Brian has already changed her, she said. “Only those of us who have been through this can understand how it feels.”
Brian Mbaruk is just one of the 67 young men who remain missing in the Lower Mainland since 2000, according to the RCMP’s Surrey-based missing persons centre, which monitors ongoing missing-persons cases from all of the province’s police forces.
Those 67 unsolved cases all feature young men between the ages of 15 and 30 from all RCMP jurisdictions in the Lower Mainland, as well as all municipal police forces including Vancouver, Abbotsford, Delta, Port Moody, and West Vancouver.
Of those 67 cases, around 20 of them are considered presumed suicides; six are possible drownings; a dozen could be due to foul play, eight are believed to be in hiding; and the remainder have no apparent explanation, said Insp. Gary Shinkaruk, who oversees the centre.
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He said “misadventure” could be a possible explanation for some of the cases.
“We certainly have a lot of situations where we really don’t have a good reason why the person has gone missing,” he said. “This is a vast province.”
There’s been no noticeable spike in the amount of new cases across the region, Shinkaruk said.
There are thousands of missing persons cases each year in the Lower Mainland, Shinkaruk said. Vancouver has averaged more than 3,000 cases in each of the last three years. Surrey gets more than 2,000 missing person reports each year.
“The overwhelming majority of them come back safe and sound,” he said, noting that many of them go missing repeatedly.
Shinkaruk said an important part of his job is to make sure “front-line officers” make no assumptions about any of the cases. Just because a person has gone missing “habitually” before, that doesn’t explain the current case, he said.
The missing persons centre was created in 2005, Shinkaruk said. Its role is to review and monitor ongoing cases from around the province. “We have access to all the investigations,” he said, explaining that investigators have used an integrated program known as Police Records Information Management Environment since 2008.
Missing persons investigations belong to the jurisdiction in which the person was last seen, but the centre keeps an eye on each case, providing reviews, suggestions, criticism and instructions, he explained. “There’s extremely good cooperation.”
When leads dry up the job “becomes a real challenge,” Shinkaruk said. “You keep going at whatever … you can get.”
The officer said investigators will often re-interview people several years later, or bounce new information off old sources, hoping to “jog” memories. “There’s no simple way to do it,” he said, adding that social media has become a valuable tool in recent years.
Of more than 3,500 missing persons cases in Vancouver in 2011, only four of them remain unsolved – including Mbaruk’s. Each of the missing men are aged between 19 and 25.
The most recent investigation that has drawn the public’s attention is the case of 25-year-old Matthew Huszar, who disappeared on Dec. 16, 2011. He was last seen just before midnight leaving a Christmas party at the Lamplighter pub in Gastown.
Police said all leads in that case have been exhausted and incoming tips have slowed. His family offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to his recovery.
Up until last week, five cases involving young men in Vancouver remained unsolved, but one of them – 29-year-old Daniel Holt – was found after the VPD made a public plea. Holt was living in another community under a different name.
VPD has said there is no reason to believe any of the remaining four cases are connected.
– For Mary Jane Mbaruk the not knowing what happened to her son Brian is the worst thing.
“There’s a uniqueness to this kind of grief,” Mbaruk said.
It has already changed her, she said. “Only those of us who have been through this can understand how it feels.”
Unlike Alberta, police agencies in B.C. don’t have a singular database available to the public with pictures and information on all the provinces unsolved missing persons cases.
Such a database should be created, said Wendy Bosma of Kelowna. Her 25-year-old son Michael Bosma disappeared in Kelowna in 2006 and hasn’t been heard from since.
“The site could include information on how to search for your missing loved one, and what to expect as time progresses,” said Bosma, who runs a WordPress blog in honour of her son called wenswritings. She uses the blog to network with other people in her situation, and has published more than 10 years-worth of missing persons articles and profiles from around the province.
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