Off-duty searchers help with mountain rescue Two members of the Coquitlam Search and Rescue team may have been holidaying in the Bugaboo Mountains last month but they were far from off duty. Mike Gudaitis and Kyle Skidmore were climbing McTech Arete
outside of Golden, B.C. when they witnessed a climber in another group fall between 50 and 60 feet at around 12:30 p.m. The pair rappelled off their route to the steep snow to meet up with the injured climber, who was accompanied by mem-
THE WEDNESDAY
bers of her group. Skidmore built an anchor to lower the injured climber on to a safe ledge, where Gudaitis, who works as a paramedic, was able to assess her injuries. By 3:30 p.m., Bighorn Helicopters carry-
ing members of the ColumbiaValley Search and Rescue team began to arrive, landing on a glacier.The injured woman was carried on a stretcher to the chopper and airlifted to Invermere Hospital. Skidmore said the
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time between the woman being injured and arriving at hospital was about four hours.“This is a very remote area with no cellphone coverage,”he said. “It is not uncommon to have rescues in this area take multiple days.” gmckenna@tricitynews.com
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Tri-City women shipping shoes to help kids By Jason Roessle THE TRI-CITY NEWS
A Christmas vacation to a Caribbean hot spot has led a Port Moody woman to start a group that will send thousands of donated shoes to an impoverished country. Kelly Strongitharm took a trip late last year to the Dominican Republic, where she met Ruben, a boy whom she had sponsored through World Vision for the past seven years. see POOR, page A5
Ruben’s Shoes founder Kelly Strongitharm (right) and board member Desiree Dupuis hold up a few of the 10,000 pairs of shoes the Port Moody-based non-profit society has collected. JASON ROESSLE/TRI-CITY NEWS
Coq. will vote Oct. 26 By Janis Warren THE TRI-CITY NEWS
Coquitlam voters will head to the polls on Saturday, Oct. 26 to elect two new city councillors. The byelection is being held after former councillors Linda Reimer and Selina Robinson were elected Tri-City MLAs in the May 14 provincial election. see ABOUT $150K, page A7
24 years later, body identified Case changed the way cold cases are investigated By Gary McKenna THE TRI-CITY NEWS
A body pulled from the Fraser River in Coquitlam 24 years ago has been identified as
that of a Prince George man. And the case, in which the corpse floated downstream nearly 800 km, is changing the way the B.C. Coroners Service conducts its investigations. Brian Carman Law’s body was pulled from the river in 1989 but, be-
cause of the distance it had travelled, investigators had difficulty identifying the remains. When a recent DNA database search turned up a match with a sample provided by the deceased’s mother in Prince George, investigators were shocked. “A completely unex-
pected match came up completely out of the blue,” said Bill Inkster, an identification specialist with the Identification and Disaster Response Unit (IDRU), a section of the coroners service. “Our jaws dropped when we realized how far [the body] had travelled.” Normally, when a
body is pulled from the Fraser River in the Lower Mainland, investigators will look as far as Hope or Lillooet for matching files. But because of this recent case, Inkster said investigators will likely start to widen their search parameters. see DNA FROM, page A9