The mother of a six-year-old boy who has been missing for almost a month in Alberta is asking why police have not taken more steps to find her son.
“I was a wreck, because they said he was presumed dead so like I just lost my mind,” Maegan Bernicky, the mother of Darius Macdougall, said in an exclusive interview with Global News. “How do you release that he’s presumed dead if you haven’t found a body or anything?”
Darius went missing on Sept. 21 while on a camping trip in the Crowsnest Pass area. His family reported him missing after he went for a walk with other young family members near Island Lake Campground, about 250 kilometres south of Calgary.
A ground search was started, but on Oct. 1 it was ended, though the investigation continues.
“At this point, if Darius is still in the search site, it is our belief that he is no longer alive,” RCMP Cpl. Gina Slaney said at the time.
Bernicky said Darius was at the campground with his father, his dad’s girlfriend, his grandmother, and aunts and uncles.
“I was home and then I got told that my son disappeared,” she said. “I went crazy.”
She said she went out and looked for him.
Bernicky told Global News that RCMP have been in touch with her but with few updates. She said she called them last Tuesday.
“I said, ‘Why didn’t you guys classify this as a possible abduction, why aren’t you guys looking at it like that?’” she said.
The RCMP have not issued an Amber Alert since Darius went missing, but sent out a Child Search Alert in collaboration with the Missing Children Society of Canada (MCSC).
These alerts are issued after an investigating team has defined the perimeter of the search and are sent to people registered with the MCSC to receive text alerts.
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A set of conditions must be met for an Amber Alert to be issued, the RCMP say.
An Amber Alert is issued if the child is under 18 and police have reasonable grounds to believe the victim has been abducted and is in imminent danger; enough descriptive information has been obtained about the victim, abductor and/or vehicle involved; and the alert can be issued in a time frame where there’s a reasonable expecation the child can be returned or the abductor apprehended.
As police don’t believe Darius was “removed from the site,” an alert has not been issued.
“Based on the information the family on scene provided, there was nothing to lead investigators to believe that he was subject to an abduction,” Slaney said in an email to Global News.
Ronnie DeGagne, a friend of Bernicky, started a petition calling for changes to the Amber Alert framework to give police more power to issue such alerts. It has more than 13,200 verified signatures so far.
The goal of the petition, known as Darius’s Law, is to modernize the framework and give police discretion to issue alerts in high-risk disappearances, “not only confirmed abductions.”
It also calls for a clear definition of “high-risk disappearances” to include cases near highways, borders or wilderness areas, or when a child’s age or conditions create imminent danger.
“When a boy goes missing or any child goes missing in a proximity to a highway, wooded area and a border, we need to have every tool on the table to be able to act, especially in those critical hours,” DeGagne said in an interview.
Bernicky said she’s also questioning why roads around the campground were not shut down.
Asked why roads were not closed, Slaney said a “criminal element” is what may prompt a closure.
“For missing persons investigations, roadways are not closed unless there are grounds to believe a criminal element is in play,” Slaney wrote. “In cases such as this, Search and Rescue is deployed to the point last seen, a radius is established and searched in a thorough manner.”
Though RCMP say no information has so far been received indicating Darius was “removed from the site,” Bernicky told Global News she still has hope.
“I feel like he’s out there, I feel like someone has him, and I’ve felt that since Day 2 or Day 3 when they were getting no hits of him on the mountain,” she said.
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