Isn't that an interesting name? Whiskeyjack. She won't be using it much now that she was murdered on Friday night.
The 42 yr. old aboriginal woman, raced into the hall of Main Rooms near Main & Powell St. just before midnight, screaming that she had been stabbed. She made it down to the street where she collapsed. Other tenants called 9-1-1 but Whiskeyjack died in hospital an hour later.
Whiskeyjack, according to Carnegie members, was a drug addict. She was stabbed just 2 1/2 blocks away from controversial projects for addicts that have drawn world attention to the Downtown Eastiside: the supervised drug injection site and the free heroin dispensing project. But whether she used these services is unknown.
Several patrons and staff at Carnegie Center knew Whiskeyjack, as she used to come around. She apparently picked up her mail there, as a regular recalls seeing the name "Whiskeyjack" on the list at the reception desk for people who use Carnegie as their mailing address.
Whiskeyjack was stabbed multiple times, according to the media. There are conflicting stories at Carnegie; one story is that she was stabbed in the neck, another is that her throat was slit. Paramedics would have been close by as the Fire Hall is at the end of the block where she collapsed.
Whiskeyjack's boyfriend is a suspect. The word on the street is that he is hispanic, although that has not been confirmed.
[Makes you wonder if he could be one of the many hispanic illegals on the Downtown Eastside selling drugs. Even the other drug dealers are fed up with these illegals. They tell them to scram because they are quick to draw "heat".]
The Main Rooms is a drug scene. About three years ago, just before Christmas, Downtown Eastsiders walking into the Univeristy of B.C. Learning Exchange next door to use the free public access computers saw evidence of this. They watched as half a dozen bodies were carried down onto the street from the Main Rooms. All had died from the same batch of drugs in the same room.
The Main Rooms, like numerous low-rent rooming houses on the Downtown Eastside, is owned by Betty Woo. Woo has a reputation amongst longtime Downtown Eastside residents for being a good landlord, believe it or not. She is occasionally around the Downtown Eastside with her husband Jimmy who sometimes carries a repair kit.
"It was like an episode of CSI," a Carnegie regular repeatedly said of the scene on Saturday, the day after the murder. "People in white outfits were going into the Main Rooms and there were police vans and trucks."
The forensic team was working the scene again on Sunday. "It was like CSI," the Carnegie regular said again. "They were carrying out bags of evidence. There was a woman taking off her white suit. She was real beautiful, just like you'd see on CSI. She was putting on her glasses; I was trying not to stare at her. She was opening little drawers in the back of the police van just like in CSI."
Watching the forensics team back on Sunday, this onlooker, a white guy, said twice that he was pleased to see that the police were not taking the attitude that Whiskeyjack's life was cheap. Vancouver Police have been accused for years of displaying this attitude towards the lives of women in the Downtown Eastside underclass when a serial killer appeared to be targeting them, resulting in the current infamous Pickton trial. "They're taking this real serious," the onlooker said of Whiskeyjack's murder. "They're not treating this like, 'Ahh, just another dead Indian druggie.' "
Whiskeyjack is a bird, a Canadian jay. It is not known whether Marily Whiskeyjack was Cree but according to the Canadian Gage dictionary, "whiskeyjack" is adapted from a Cree word.
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9 comments:
I'm sorry to hear about Marilyn. Her last name is a kind of bird, a certain kind of Jay, it is a corvid, like crows and ravens. Have a good journey Marilyn. You will be missed.
The lady is dead for no good reason. We must ask why these things come to pass in our society, one in which CSI is possible on the mean streets and at the same time so is a woman being stabbed to death in a skid road hotel room. Look at it: a filthy and nasty way to go, stabbed to death, and the result is a gang of high-tech weenies checking it out. Where's the over-lap? How can science-fiction live side-by-side with a Stone Age act like murder by stabbing?
The povertarians are always screaming and sometimes smashing things in support for their demands for more money to do their povertarian thing. Is it worthwhile? Do povertarians accomplish anything good? Will giving more and more money to the povertarians keep even one person from being stabbed to death in a skid road hotel room? Or will giving more and more money to povertarians mean that more and more in-laws and common-law spouses get union jobs fixing up skid road hotel room plaster and carpets, patching up blood-stained carpets and bullet holes in walls? Where does all this money go? Who gets the actual cash, and who ends up dead on the streets while the povertarians emote in grand style about their concerns for "The Poor"?
Every time someone is murdered on the Lower Eastside, whenever a person o.d.s, when a person just gives up and dies from nothing special, there one will find the povertarians with their mouths twisted and their hands out demanding more money to "save the poor." Well, things just keep on getting worse, and they get worse and worse, and more people die of stupider and more outrageous causes all the time, and still the povertarians are demanding more and more money. You die, the tax-payer coughs up money, and the povertarians weep, weep for joy that people all round can be so stupid as to keep paying for this madness and keep thanking the povertarians for perpetuating it.
You might not like the police, and they perhaps don't like you. More than likely, neither group really cares one way or the other at a personal level, personal lives not really entering into the situation, both groups having private lives to pursue, the cops having a job of keeping criminals and lunatics from butchering people at random. An the people want to live unhindered. But the povertarians won't leave it alone to its own minimal necessities. They have to intervene in every little detail of the lives of cops and robbers to mess about and make sure no one escapes their hands. Bind the hands of the cops, and then break the arms of the people so they are helpless and defenseless.
The cops can do a good enough job at keeping the worse of the worst from slaughtering women on the Lower Eastside, if they were allowed to lock up the worst; and the people could do well enough to survive had they the chance to make money at whatever they might do; but the povertarians prevent both sides from acting rightly by controlling the incomes of the poor by ensuring that all money coming to the area is filter through the povertarians themselves, doled out to relatives and friends, and that the cops have no say in protecting the people from the bad guys who kill. Marylin is dead because the cops couldn't keep a killer off the streets. She's dead because the povertarians need killers to drum up cash from the tax-payers, big stories in the papers to scare them into giving more cash to the povertarians. And you get?
You get dead, thanks to the povertarians "providing support." If the cops can send in a CSI movie team to look at the mess of a woman butchered they can figure out in advance who's likely to stab someone. The cops aren't stupid. It's the tax-payer whose stupid. They keep on giving money to the povertarians who make a fine living on the dead in the Lower Eastside, while the ops trudge around doing next to nothing because it's not worth the trouble of protecting people if the povertarians are going to jump all over them and scream for more money to "protect the poor."
Marylin is dead today because the povertarians wreck our society. We have such things that a few years ago no one could have even dreamed of outside Hollywood. So how is it that the people get knifed like sheep? It's thanks to the povertarians making sure it never ends, that it always gets worse so they can demand yet more cash from the idiots who pay their taxes to keep everyone still alive happy or at least quiet.
Get yourselves away from these parasite povertarians. They need you drugged up and homeless or ded so they can go to the tax-payer to demand more money to "protect" you. No, get rid of them. Live your own life. Don't let the blood-sucking povertarians get away with even one more worthless and pointless death. Dying for the sake of filling the bank accounts of the povertarians isn't a reasonable way to go out. these people are not you friends. They need you to die so they can make a living from the rest who will die off sooner or later in misery. Get away from these leeches. This society can create and maintain CSI, so you can be fairly sure it can also do better than give money to a load of parasites. This society can provide you with far more than a miserable death in a skid road hotel. You don't have to die on the street. You can get away from the leeches and make something better on your own. Pull off the leeches. Don't just lay down and bleed to death on the street.
Fly away from the parasite. Or run. Or walk. Even crawl away so you can live.
Anonymous,
Thanks for the information about "Whiskyjack" being a bird.
A friend from Carnegie Center told me last night too that it was a bird. So we looked it up in the Gage dictionary and discovered that it was a Canadian jay. According to the dictionary, the word is an adaption of a Cree word, although I don't know if Marilyn Whiskyjack was Cree.
I updated the post to include this information.
Thanks for taking the time to respond.
dag,
I think the Vancouver Police are trying to say the same thing you're saying. Just-retired Chief Jamie Graham has endorsed a federal Conservative candidate, Mary McNeil, on his website -- according to the Vancouver Courier newspaper. And McNeil, according to the Courier, has stated that the current VPD Chief Cho and his family have been supportive of her candidacy too. MacNeil is a member of the Police Board.
Police chiefs supporting McNeil, a 'star candidate' for Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper, are making a clear statement: they do not support the projects of the povertarians such as the "safe fixing site" (where NDP MP Libby Davies' son Leif Erikson was given a job) or the heroin give-away project, or a steady stream of street workers earning union wages to hand out needles to people who want to fix. It is no secret that Harper is not a fan of such projects.
I don't know what Marilyn Whisky Jack thought of these multi-million dollar projects that the povertarians were operating just three blocks from where she was stabbed. She may have supported them. Or maybe, like many addicts, she was just indifferent to them.
Many addicts pay scant attention to these projects which appear to have been set up to help cash-addicted povertarians as much as drug-addicted Downtown Eastsiders.
Another reason, police chiefs may be throwing their support behind a Conservative is that they are fed up with not being able to do anything about the illegals from Central and South America who come to Vancouver's Downtown Eastside for no other reason than to sell drugs. Because these illegals are coddled by the Canadian courts and Immigration, the police have told the media that they can't keep them off the streets of the Downtown Eastside. I don't know if it was an illegal who murdered Whisky Jack; so far what I'm hearing is just speculation and rumors. But a friend at Carnegie told me that two illegals stabbed his friend on Hastings and disappeared, never to be caught. Also, it was an illegal who killed a guy on Hastings a few months back by sticking a piece or rebar up his nose.
No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a part of the continent." So writes one of my favorite poets, John Donne.
Funny, isn't it, that the povertarians, those Sunday school teachers-gone-wrong harp like nasty little angels on the theme of "community" while they grab cash with one hand and the throats of the poor with the other, all the while making sweet wounds for the choir handing out cheques from the suburban wings. Community? No, it's hell on earth these utopian monsters make. Gnostic devils. Communitarianism rather than ommunity. The povertarians play a game of religious make-believe in which they're saints or moreso, and the sinners to be saved, the Marylins and the others who get stabbed to death are soon enough forgotten in favor of some new cause or issue that will bring in more funding, an new opera, a new social program, a new reason to get out on the streets and protest to demand contrition from the rich and guilty.
Yes, we are all connected to the greater Hmanness by our communion in th eHuman experience; but we are all our own selves first and foremost, regardless of the smarmy cliches used to bang the drum of r cash on the streets. who died? Not the community. A real Human being died, stabbed to death and dead on the streets. Watch the povertarians weep over that. They'll do it for money. They'll have a parade. They'll erect a monument. They'll have a martyr's day in Marylin's honor if it'll bring in some union jobs to the new programme. Oh, I mean until they go on strike.
My favorite poet, he also writes to you this:
"Do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee."
Not for the community. For you. You are a person, dear reader, not a fucking community.
Marilyn was a daughter, mother, sister, aunty, cousin, and friend. She had her demons, but she was still a person. She will and is missed terribly. Yes she was Cree. Yes she was addicted. And here's hoping that they find the person responsible and they are brought to justice. She deserves that, so does her family.
Dear Judge,
It has been a very hard couple years. Our family is trying to deal with this tragedy. I remember when the phone call came in, it felt like a movie. I was in my room watching tv. when the phone rang, I knew something was wrong, the whole house was silent, You could hear a pin drop, My grandmother let out a scream, that gave me goosebumps, my throat swelled up as I ran upstairs. She fell into the couch, clutching the phone. I picked it up to hear and officer telling me that " my mother had passed away". Marilyn Whiskeyjack was a mother of 5 children. I as the oldest had to tell all my siblings, that our mother had been taken away from us. We never lived with her, cause of her addiction, but we all had close contact with her. At our awake, in native tradition, we sit with the body for three days before. Remembering her. The looks on all my brothers and sisters faces, was excruciating. We baried her, in the cemetary. I still remember when I shovelled dirt onto her coffin, I felt empty. This tragedy has been very painful on our whole family. Marilyn was not a rich person. She was not even an important person in most peoples eyes. But she was very Important to us. I never want anyone to feel the way our family feels. We lost someone, that had alot of years ahead of her. She didn't die, from a freak accident, she was taken away from us by someones hands. Someone that didnt know that she had children. Today, Marilyn would of been a grandmother of two babys. One was born two weeks ago, the other was born a month ago. I leave it in your hands, I know that you will find it in you to come out with the right decision. Our family doesn't want this to happen to another family.
Thank you,
Jerry WhiskeyJack (son)
Jerry,
Thank you for this. You really managed to convey the fact that Marilyn was loved.
Could you please tell us where the trial is being held. Is it over?
the trial is still being held, the conviction date is tuesday sept 21 at the new west supreme court house. the murderer is named TERRY HERMAN. He must not be allowed to get off with a slap on the wrist. Please don't let this happen again
jerry
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