I first met Kirsten Patrick in 2019. She reached out to me after the Town of Smithers removed a homeless camp at the corner of King St. and Hwy 16. She had been staying there with her boyfriend, her mom and her mom’s boyfriend for eight months. She told me there had been no warning. They returned home one day to find their tents gone. To pour salt on the wound, her younger sister Jessica had died the previous year and some of the photos were in the tents.
“It literally went to the dump,” Kirsten told me. “My baby sister’s big picture that we had from her funeral last year and her wallet. That was the last thing we had from her. It really hurts, it was the only thing we had.”
After that, I would bump into her occasionally on the street and we would say 'hi' quickly.
Once she invited me to a memorial for her sister, Jessica. We met where the family found her body on Hudson Bay Mountain Road. Kirsten proudly introduced me to her children, who were in the care of other people at the time. She talked about how much she missed her sister, and her laugh. And how frustrated she was that there were no answers.
I talked with Kirsten on occasion about the difficulties trying to find housing and the hardships of living on the streets.
She bravely stood up during an open house Smithers held in 2023 about proposed changes to the parks bylaw.
Approximately 200 people showed up and many spoke against allowing temporary overnight sheltering locations in local parks. A lot of people were very angry.
Kristen everyone she was living in the encampment at Veterans Peace Park and said she tries her best to keep her area clean. She put a face to issue.
She was always willing to talk to me when changes were happening within the encampment. The town put up trailers at one point. It tried to move it. It tried to clean it up. There was even a time during Covid when there were tents set up on the outskirts of town. Kirsten would also give a voice to encampment, even though she moved in and out of it. She gave me insight when the town was trying to figure out a spot for the encampment.
She also spoke to me about her struggles with getting sober. It was never easy for her. It never seemed like luck was on her side. The resources were not there to help her either.
I found out about her death on a comment on a social media post. Someone accused her of stealing something and Kirsten’s cousin pointed out that it could not be her because she was dead. My heart sank when I read that.
It is so easy to walk by the encampment near the Smithers town hall and think about how messy it is. It is easy to be annoyed by people who are begging for money by the door of the grocery store. What isn’t easy sometimes is to realize that these are people. They have names. They are someone’s child. And some have children.
We need to do better.
We need to advocate for more resources from higher levels of government such as a detox centre and a low barrier shelter. Kirsten was a member of our community, she deserved better and more help.
Marisca Bakker is a reporter with The Interior News in Smithers, B.C.
