Community keeps hope alive at annual Tamra Keepness barbecue

Hundreds gathered in Regina Friday for a community BBQ to honour Tamra Keepness, whose been missing for 22 years. Jacob Carr reports.

The annual Tamra Keepness barbeque serves as a reminder that it may have been more than two decades since her disappearance from her core community neighbourhood home, but residents refuse to give up hope.

“Just the loss that the city feels, I really believe that the police really feel this loss as well. They’re here all the time, like this is their thing. And they’ve been doing it, and that helped me know that she’s not forgotten,” said community member Dan Lindsay.

Several members of the Regina Police Service (RPS) are on hand each year to grill up burgers and hotdogs for community members, and hand out food to residents.

Tim Seiferling, superintendent in charge of the Support Services Division, told CTV News on Friday that the tools that RPS now have at their disposal in missing persons cases, is leaps and bounds ahead of 20 years ago.

He said they have not given up on solving Tamra’s disappearance.

“We have a missing persons coordinator, and now we’ll look at information that’s coming forward and do an assessment on an investigation and see if there are avenues that you can go and look into immediately, especially age, risk factors and those types of things that we look at,” he said.

Natasha Kennedy, executive director of Regina Treaty Status Indian Services, said that the organization has been working hand in hand with the police for many years with regards to Keepness’ case.

“We jointly go together on this adventure all the time to make sure that we’re bringing together community and understanding and as well as keeping in the forefront that Tamra has gone missing. And then if there is any information or any thing that we can support, we can do that jointly,” she said.

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While the case is still yet to be solved some two decades later, for community members like Lindsay, seeing people come together for the barbeque provides a ray of sunshine and a glimmer of hope.

“It takes the community to raise the child, every child matters, all great slogans but they mean nothing unless we do the work to give those words meaning,” he said.

RPS continue to encourage members of the public to provide any information in regard to Keepness’ disappearance.

They are currently offering a $50,000 reward for information leading to the closure of the investigation.