Youth are dying in Regina’s shelter system

There’s still so much Martha and David Severight don’t know about the death of their granddaughter and daughter Serenity “Sync” Severight.

In October 2023, the then 17-year-old, who was raised in Regina and had ties to the Cote First Nation, was staying at the Street Culture Project Tuhk Sih Nowin Youth Shelter in Regina. On December 18, 2023, over three months after checking in, Serenity died by suicide in her room at the shelter. She had turned 18 less than a month before.

Days earlier, she had told staff that she was having suicidal thoughts and had requested to go to the psychiatric unit to get help. But due to staffing issues and disagreements between staff and management about the best course of action, she was never taken. Instead, the youth was left alone in her room.

“I raised Serenity since she was 18 months old and we spent nearly every day together. All of a sudden she is gone and I don’t know anything about her for the past 3 months. Just that she is dead by suicide,”  Martha writes to the Sask Dispatch. “I was told that she was in the safest place for her by everyone that was supposed to help her but when she reached out for help there was nobody there for her. [...] I kept her alive for 16 [and a half years] and as soon as she leaves my home to get help, she ends up dead.”  

The teenager’s family say they’ve been left with questions, including what happened at the shelter during the final three months of Serenity’s life, who was the last person to speak to her before she died, and what happened to her belongings, including the clothes she was wearing when she passed which Martha wants to dispose of in ceremony. 

Serenity’s death isn’t the first suicide of an Indigenous youth in the shelter. On February 12, 2021, another Indigenous youth died by suicide on shelter premises.

“I was told that she was in the safest place for her by everyone that was supposed to help her but when she reached out for help there was nobody there for her.”  

Following Serenity’s death, workers familiar with Street Culture Project at the time of the suicides have come forward with concerns about an organization that is top-heavy, understaffed, and closed off to feedback from front-line workers. They say these issues have put the health and safety of both Street Culture staff and the vulnerable youth in their care at risk. 

Too few staff to care for residents
Street Culture Project (SCP) is a not-for-profit that works with youth who are at risk of homelessness. In addition to the Tuhk Sih Nowin shelter, the organization offers a variety of programming including youth mentorship and access to a cultural liaison, as well as running four peer homes in Regina. The youth who stay in their shelter face more serious challenges than most adolescents, but Serenity was particularly vulnerable and SCP knew it. 

On October 4, 2023, days after her arrival at Street Culture, Serenity told a staff member that she did not feel that she could keep herself safe. The disclosure prompted her admission to the Adolescent Psychiatry Unit in Regina General Hospital the following day, where she remained for around two weeks before being discharged and returning to the shelter. At the time of the hospitalization, Street Culture was also aware that Serenity had attempted suicide at least once before, four years earlier. 

Serenity told a shelter worker she felt “really good” after being discharged from the hospital in October 2023. However, by late November some front-line staff working directly with Serenity were concerned enough by her behaviour and affect that at one point they were checking on her every hour overnight to ensure she was not self-harming, something she had done previously while at the shelter. 

A couple of weeks later on December 13, Serenity told Laura,* a shelter worker, that she was again experiencing suicidal ideation and could not guarantee her own safety. Serenity told Laura that she had a plan, which moved Laura to do everything she could to get the youth help. 

“My original plan was to drive her to the hospital so she could get admitted that night because she eventually agreed to,” says Laura. 

But understaffing made getting Serenity to the hospital difficult. Laura was one of two people on staff that night, meaning that, before she could drive Serenity, she needed to find a replacement to look after the other youth.  

Last time Serenity had gone to the emergency room, she had to wait there all night and most of the following morning. This time, she wanted to be accompanied while she waited. The problem was the on-call staff member could only cover for Laura for a short while, not all night. Serenity was given the option of going to the hospital emergency that night and waiting alone in the emergency waiting room or being taken to the hospital in the morning. She chose to wait until the morning. 

They made a new safety plan together so Serenity could remind herself why she wanted to stay alive: to give hugs to people, to continue seeing the people she cared about, to be funny, and to see her cat, Bobby, again. 

That night, Laura let Serenity stay on the couch in a common area where she was in direct view of the staff instead of in her room. “Which is not allowed,” Laura says, “but what are you going to do?”

The following day, Serenity reminded her case plan coordinator that she still wanted to be taken to the hospital. But the coordinator had a staff meeting, so Serenity kept waiting. 

At the meeting, staff discussed Serenity’s request, and ultimately decided against bringing her to the hospital that morning because Serenity had recently turned 18, meaning she would be admitted to the adult psychiatric unit with adults of all ages instead of the adolescent unit like last time. 

Staff worried that being admitted to the adult unit would be distressing for Serenity and they recommended that before going to the hospital she call COAST (Community Outreach and Support) for a pre-intake assessment. It’s unclear if Serenity contacted COAST. 

After staff decided that Serenity would stay at the shelter, they made a new safety plan together so Serenity could remind herself why she wanted to stay alive: to give hugs to people, to continue seeing the people she cared about, to be funny, and to see her cat, Bobby, again. 

She was worried about Bobby – he needed to take his medication regularly and she wondered whether her grandmother remembered to give him the doses. Serenity told a staff member that she wanted to go to her grandmother’s house to check in on the cat, but the shelter worker discouraged her from returning home, so Serenity sent her grandmother a message on Facebook asking for an update on the cat. Martha responded with a picture of Bobby curled up on a chair.  

Two days later, on the evening of December 17, was the last time Serenity was seen alive. At roughly 7 a.m. on December 18, 2023, she was found dead in her room at Street Culture. 

Failure to keep youth safe
After Serenity’s death, SCP workers say they were largely expected to continue working as usual.

According to Laura, the only support SCP provided staff was “a hotline to the [shelter] coordinators.” She says expecting workers to lean on their bosses to process the suicide was “unrealistic” especially since “the bosses have shown zero support. Respectfully, there’s no fucking way I would [call the bosses for support].” Drew,* another SCP worker, recalls that the week after Serenity’s death, “there were random people from different agencies coming in, [asking staff] ‘do you want to talk?’ After that nothing, absolutely nothing.”

A couple of days after Serenity’s death, her family held a wake on Cote First Nation. According to David Severight, the family had not invited anyone from SCP to attend the wake. When Devon Fairbairn, a former cook at the shelter, unexpectedly showed up at the wake with a shelter resident who had been close to Serenity, David asked them to leave. Fairbairn was later fired by SCP for “insubordination”, with the organization claiming he had gone to the wake without their permission, which Fairbairn denies. Another staff member present at the time confirmed that Fairbairn was directed to attend the wake.

“Everyone’s afraid to say anything because if you do, there are consequences.”

After the death in 2021, workers increased the frequency of check-ins on youth, but otherwise “there weren’t a whole lot of changes made,” recalls Sara* who was working at SCP at the time. Bedrooms were left unchanged, though Sara says “the rooms were pretty safe as is.” Two years later, shortly after Serenity’s death, Drew says the organization changed some fixtures in the bedrooms that were dangerous for youth experiencing suicidal ideation. 

Gina* says a lack of trust between front-line workers and senior management at Street Culture Project created an environment where staff couldn’t share the challenges they and the youth were facing. “Everyone’s afraid to say anything because if you do, there are consequences,” says Gina.

“It was not at all an environment where you were able to bring up any sorts of concerns you had whether it be about the issues that staff were facing or the issues the kids were facing,” says Laura. “It was just a very busy environment. We were understaffed so there really wasn’t any opportunity to connect with [the] kids unless it was a crisis situation, which oftentimes is too late.” 

She says that while management was ostensibly there to provide additional support to front-line staff, “I very rarely saw them actually supporting out front because they were usually in their back office. [They were] doing work, which is important, but I feel like the most important work is right in front of them.” She says that on-call staff were “usually as helpful as they could be,” but it was not uncommon for people on call to have their phones on “Do Not Disturb” mode, leaving overnight staff in a position where they had to call the police when a situation escalated beyond their ability to deal with it. 

“You would think after people [accused of] sexual harassment [left] that the place would improve,” says Gina, referring to a sexual harassment scandal in 2020 when 16 workers made credible allegations of sexual harassment that ultimately led to the resignations and early retirements of senior leadership, including the organization’s founder, Kim Sutherland. Rather “it’s gotten worse.” 

Turnover at SCP among front-line workers is high. Three of the five workers interviewed for this article no longer work at SCP, since December 2023. A fourth interviewee was fired without cause two years ago, prompting a colleague to quit in protest. According to front-line workers, the organization is top-heavy, which has made it difficult to ascertain who is calling the shots, leading to chaotic meetings and decisions made by people who are not involved in the front-line work. Between the shelter and the peer homes, SCP is responsible for the care of up to 34 youth at any given time. The SCP wage guide from December 2020 indicates that the hourly wage range for front-line youth mentors was $15-$16, while front-line case workers could expect to make between $17-$21 per hour and case managers between $21-$24 per hour. 

When phoned by the Sask Dispatch regarding the suicide, the steps SCP has taken to address it, and the concerns raised by staff, CEO of SCP Jeff Dudar said the organization would not be commenting or answering any questions. Alysia McKay, the organization’s chief strategy officer did not respond to a request for comment.

In a province that set a new record for deaths by suicide in 2022, and where suicide rates consistently trend higher than the national average, few agencies seemed interested in helping make sense of the systemic factors that contributed to the suicides of two youth in their teens. 

Other agencies in Saskatchewan responsible for preventing and addressing youth suicide also didn’t want to be interviewed for this article. The Ministry of Social Services, SCP’s largest financial contributor, and the Saskatchewan Advocate for Children & Youth, whose mandate includes investigating “any matter concerning, or services provided to, children and youth by a provincial ministry, agency of the government, or publicly funded health entity” and “rais[ing] awareness of the rights, interests, and well-being of children and youth,” both denied requests for interviews. The Saskatchewan Coroners Service, which was called to the SCP premises after the deaths of both youth and which noted in a 2023 report that when it comes to youth suicide, “[s]pecial attention must be made towards the children and youth age group (10-19 years old),” also declined to speak on the record about even generalities around the issue of suicide among unhoused young people in the province, like the risks that youth in care face when they age out; what, if anything can be done to prevent such a catastrophic outcome as suicide; and whether there would have been more accountability required from the Ministry of Social Services had these young people died just before their 18th birthdays instead of immediately after. In a province that set a new record for deaths by suicide in 2022, and where suicide rates consistently trend higher than the national average, few agencies seemed interested in helping make sense of the systemic factors that contributed to the suicides of two youth in their teens. 

For any organization that shelters at-risk youth to not have a comprehensive suicide prevention strategy is shocking, particularly in Saskatchewan, where suicide rates have been at crisis levels for years. In the province’s north, suicide is the leading cause of death for individuals ages 10 to 49. 

Throughout the province, suicide rates among Indigenous people are roughly four times higher than among non-Indigenous people. According to a 2021 report from the Saskatchewan Coroners Service, Indigenous people make up 35 per cent of all deaths by suicide in the province despite being only 17 per cent of the population; further, a 2022 report from the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN) found that the suicide rate among Indigenous girls was “particularly alarming,” with Indigenous females being more than six times as likely to die by suicide than their non-Indigenous peers. Notably, the report from the coroner’s office found that suicide rates among Indigenous people drop off sharply after age 30, meaning that if young people like Serenity can stay alive through the years when they are at highest risk, their chances of leading a full life improve significantly. 

Eighteen and cut off from youth supports 
Both of the Indigenous youths’ deaths are their own private catastrophes – two young people deprived of their entire lifetimes and their communities and loved ones deprived of their companionship and contributions. 

But their deaths are also emblematic of a more insidious systemic catastrophe: the lack of support and resources for young people who have aged out of youth programming and systems. 

SCP only serves youth until age 18. Serenity and the youth who died in 2021 both celebrated their 18th birthdays at the shelter, and were supposed to move out of the shelter into independent living soon afterward. 

Gina says that the other youth who died by suicide in February 2021 “was being discharged to independent living” at the YWCA “due to her age.” She was staying at the SCP shelter before moving into the YWCA. The day that she died was the day she was supposed to move. 

The youth who died at the SCP shelter in 2021 was reportedly anxious about being transitioned out of the shelter, where her sister and her boyfriend also lived, although at other times she was described as being “excited” to move on from the shelter, as she had been staying there for many months. Like Serenity, she had previously expressed suicidal ideation while at the shelter and had been treated in hospital following a possible suicide attempt, also during her stay at the shelter. She was never admitted to the psychiatric unit. 

Both of the Indigenous youths’ deaths are their own private catastrophes – two young people deprived of their entire lifetimes and their communities and loved ones deprived of their companionship and contributions. 

Both of them died by suicide shortly after their 18th birthdays: the youth who took her own life in 2021 died less than a week after her birthday while Serenity died less than three weeks after hers. 

Laura says the suicides are not entirely the fault of SCP and its organizational shortcomings. “It’s one of those systemic failures.” Her colleague Gina agrees. “It’s a whole system problem. It’s [the Saskatchewan Government’s Ministry of] Social Services and having no stable place to put these kids in general.” 

When Gina started working at SCP 10 years ago she says the goal was to get youth into a more stable place to live in a month. “But now these kids are there for four, five months. That’s exhausting for a kid and they start losing hope.”  

Don Meikle, the executive director of EGADZ, which is similar to but more expansive than SCP and which provides community support and housing for youth in Saskatoon, says that cutting young people loose from youth programming the moment they turn 18 is “cruel.” “We don’t do that to our own kids. Why would we do it to these kids?” 

EGADZ’s programming was developed with the youth the organization serves and includes transitional housing for youth after they turn 18 up until the age of 23. Once young people staying in EGADZ housing turn 18, they have monthly meetings with EGADZ staff where they put forward goals for themselves and track their progress toward them. They sign an agreement with the organization about how they will conduct themselves while remaining in EGADZ housing, but otherwise, they are not expected to move on until they’re ready, according to Meikle. “And they tell us when they’re ready.” 

EGADZ also has short-term housing specifically for youth experiencing a mental health crisis. Their Ground Zero program includes access to a mental health nurse, addictions counsellor, and a Ministry of Social Services liaison, all of whom work on site. 

She loved all kinds of art, drank her coffee sweet, and liked eating MAMA noodles with an egg. Serenity’s father, David, says she loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and was excited for the new movie.

Both Serenity’s grandmother and father describe her as tender-hearted and fragile. “She let things bother her easily,” David wrote to Sask Dispatch. Martha wrote that Serenity “couldn’t speak for herself in public” and that she was “childlike in her habits.” She didn’t drink, smoke, or do drugs according to her family. “Serenity was [p]ure,” Martha wrote. 

In December 2023, as she celebrated her 18th birthday, Serenity crossed an arbitrary line after which she’d lose access to her housing and the youth programming she relied on. There was also a lack of transitional early adulthood supports available to her: SCP staff have minimal training in mental health, with many workers completing the Applied Suicide Intervention Skills (ASIST) suicide training when starting their positions and receiving no ongoing training to deal with youth in mental health crises. The Regina General Hospital doesn’t have a transitional psychiatric unit for young adults who have aged out of youth care, either.

Martha says her granddaughter was “determined” to graduate high school in 2024. She loved all kinds of art, drank her coffee sweet, and liked eating MAMA noodles with an egg. Serenity’s father, David, says she loved the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and was excited for the new movie, which he bought for her with the promise they would watch it together. She never got a chance to watch it, and David says that in the months since his daughter’s death, he hasn’t watched it either. “[I] am still keeping that promise,” he writes in a message to the Sask Dispatch. “[W]hen we meet in the [spirit] world, we will watch it.”

 

*Laura, Drew, Sara, and Gina asked to use  pseudonyms to protect themselves from reprisal.