Native Council of P.E.I. to lead ground search for Summer Kneebone, missing since Aug. 7

Acting on rumours that Summer Kneebone could be in the Mount Stewart area, the Native Council of P.E.I. is co-ordinating a ground search of that region for the missing woman, starting Tuesday morning.

Kneebone, 27, was last seen in Charlottetown on Aug. 7 as a passenger in a vehicle city police believe to be a dark-coloured 2016 Acura MDX. The SUV was recorded heading south from Value Village toward the downtown area, which police say means it could have gone over the Hillsborough Bridge and into eastern P.E.I. 

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"The Native Council got involved in the search for Summer when we realized she was an Indigenous woman," said council president Lisa Cooper, adding that Kneebone had accessed services offered through the council in the past.

Cooper said her organization has been in contact with the Charlottetown Police, since it has deep knowledge of the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous girls and women. She said members of the group are eager to aid in the search for Kneebone.

"It's not about their lifestyle. It's not about where they live, whether it is on reserve or off reserve — this is about Indigenous women who are often vulnerable that go missing," she said.

"The Native Council wanted to get involved to support the family, but also support the police."

Cooper said council members were planning to meet at the Irving gas station in Mount Stewart at 10 a.m.

"Our staff will be there. We'll set up checkpoints, we're going to go along the roads, we're going to … [search along] rivers, lakes," she said. 

Cooper said they may also put up posters with Kneebone's photo and details of the last sightings of her, "anything we can do to assist the police."

She said any information members gather will be shared with the police, who "are well aware that we're doing this."

25 to 30 vehicles have been checked

So far, Charlottetown Police officers have followed up on several tips in regard to the Acura MDX but haven't got much closer to finding Kneebone, said Det.-Sgt. Darren MacDougall.

"We've checked… 25 to 30 vehicles matching that description that we have ruled out," he told CBC News on Monday. "We're continuing to follow up on leads pertaining to that vehicle, but to date we had no success."

One problem is that the vehicle's rear-mounted licence plate could not be read in the images captured by surveillance cameras, MacDougall added. He said there's a chance the vehicle had a plastic cover over the plate that blurred its combination of numbers and letters when captured side-on by a camera.  

Police also spoke with an acquaintance of Kneebone who walked along University Avenue with her the day she went missing, MacDougall said.

"He was very co-operative. Everything he told us we followed up on. He was credible," he said.

Images captured by Charlottetown Police surveillance systems set up throughout the city automatically purge after 14 days for privacy reasons, MacDougall said.

That meant the timeline to access footage was short; Kneebone went missing on Aug. 7, but her disappearance wasn't reported to police until Aug. 15. The fact that she might have been transported in an Acura did not become known until after the Aug. 7 images would have been purged, MacDougall said.

"What I would encourage the public to do — businesses and anybody that has video surveillance equipment in their homes or whatnot that might display the outside, a roadway or whatever — if you could preserve data for Aug. 7 to Aug. 8, if you have the ability to preserve it … then please do that," he said.