2 people still missing after 6 bodies pulled from St. Lawrence River near Ontario-Quebec border

Police say they are still searching for two people after six bodies were recovered from the St. Lawrence River near Akwesasne.

The six dead include five adults and one child under the age of three who had a Canadian passport, the Akwesasne Mohawk Police Services said in a media release on Friday morning. They are believed to be an Indian family and a Romanian family who were attempting to cross into the U.S. from Canada illegally, according to police.

Casey Oakes, 30, an Akwesasne resident, remains missing, police said. Oakes was last seen on Wednesday boarding a small, light blue vessel, leaving Cornwall Island. He was dressed in black, wearing a black face mask and a black tuque. 

Also missing is an infant believed to be from the Romanian family.

Police located Oakes’s vessel near the six bodies, Lee-Ann O’Brien, the deputy chief of police for the Akwesasne Mohawk police service, said at a news conference. They also located a Canadian passport that they believe belongs to the missing infant, she said. 

A storm that brought high winds and sleet rolled through the area on Wednesday night. “It was not a good time to be out on the water,” O’Brien said. 

Kevin Sturge Lazore, Captain of the Akwasasne Fire Department’s Station 3, which participated in the search Thursday afternoon, mobilized 15 volunteer firefighters to search the river on Thursday after Oakes’s family reported him missing. 

The firefighters recovered the boat, its hull dented on the bottom as if it had hit some ice or a rock, Lazore said. 

He and O’Brien said the boat was small, and wouldn’t have been able to safely carry seven or eight people. 

“What that boat could handle and the amount of people in it, it doesn’t make a pretty picture,” Lazore said. “The river is always the major concern. … Our elders tell us, always be careful. Especially in the spring, with the run-off, the current is stronger.”

It was a Canadian Armed Forces search and rescue helicopter that found the lifeless bodies on Thursday near St. Regis Island in the St. Lawrence River. All were wearing life jackets, according to Lazore.

Police said they are waiting on the results of a post-mortem and toxicology tests to determine the cause of death.

Quebec provincial police and the Ontario provincial police air support units are continuing to search for the two missing people.

Akwesasne is a Kanien’kehá:ka (Mohawk) community about 120 kilometres west of Montreal that straddles the Canada-U.S. border and occupies territory in Ontario, Quebec and New York state.

Others attempting to enter U.S. here have required rescuing

The volunteer firefighters had thought they were only searching for one person when they discovered the six bodies Thursday.

“It’s hitting them now,” Lazore said, adding they had begun a debrief Thursday evening to process what they had seen, but were interrupted by a call for a structure fire.

Thursday wasn’t the first time Lazore’s team of firefighters has been called on to search for missing people who have tried to cross into the U.S. in the area.

He said they rescue people attempting to cross into the United States or Canada across the river and its tributaries about three or four times a year.

“It gets hard. It wears the guys down.”

Almost exactly a year ago, they rescued a group that had just made it into the United States on the river when the boat they were in hit a shallow bank and got stuck. There were about eight people on board and none of them, except for the driver who had taken off, knew how to swim. The water was cold then, too. They were able to stand up in the boat and were rescued by the volunteers and Akwasasne Police Department — which received $6.5 million in funding from the Quebec government last year to help it deal with the increased flow of human smuggling in the area.

“They were lucky. It could have been a lot worse,” Lazore said.

The fire station is next to a recreation centre where community members gathered Friday afternoon. They sit across a road from the Tsi’Snaihne River. 

A police helicopter circled above. 

Next to the fire station, a group of men lit a fire and kept it going throughout the morning.

Lazore said the fire was also to honour the dead and Oakes, who has yet to be found. 

“For us, it’s really important to keep going until we can find people — for closure,” he said.

Human trafficking a growing problem in the area

O’Brien, the deputy police chief, said the community had seen an uptick in human trafficking of people trying to reach the U.S. There had been 48 separate incidents so far this year, she said. But the deaths had nothing to do with the closure of the Roxham Road illegal border crossing, she added.

“Right now what I can tell you is that this has nothing to do with that closure,” she said. “That closure was people seeking refuge leaving the U.S. to Canada. These people were believed to be gaining entry into the U.S. It’s completely the opposite.”

Most of those who try to gain access to the U.S. through the area are Indian and Romanian families, she said, but she said she “had no idea” why that was the case. 

Ryan Brissette, a public affairs officer with U.S. Customs and Border Patrol, said the agency had seen a “massive uptick in encounters and apprehensions of different individuals” at the northern border. 

The agency saw more than eight times as many people try to cross from Canada into the U.S. in 2022 compared to previous years. Many of them — more than 64,000 — came through Quebec or Ontario into New York in 2022. 

“It’s not comparative [to the southern border],” Brissette said. “But comparing this area in the past, this is a significant number.

“Trying to identify why is a completely different issue. As an agency we don’t speculate but there’s a lot of different reasons as to why this is happening, why folks are coming all of a sudden through the northern border. I think a lot of them think it’s easier, an easy opportunity and they just don’t know the danger that it poses, especially in the winter months.”