news Father of missing Quebec girl says Victoria Stafford's family must not lose hope

[rwilli1]

Father of missing Quebec girl says Victoria Stafford's family must not lose hope


54 minutes ago




By Sidhartha Banerjee, The Canadian Press

MONTREAL - The father of a Quebec girl who has been missing for nearly two years says the best advice he can offer an Ontario family going through the same heart-rending situation is never to lose hope.
Martin Provencher's daughter, Cedrika, vanished on July 31, 2007, and, despite no sign of her, he still believes she will be found alive.
"It's very hard and nothing can prepare you for it," Provencher said in an interview Monday after hearing about the case of eight-year-old Victoria Stafford.
"I wish them the best of luck and my heart goes out to them."
Stafford, a Grade 3 student, disappeared last Wednesday after leaving school with an unidentified woman in the town of Woodstock, in southwestern Ontario.
"I can't hide that it's the type of situation that drastically changes your life, but the key is not give up hope, to keep up pressure on the police and ensure that they're doing everything they can," Provencher said.
Cedrika Provencher disappeared near her home in Trois-Rivieres after telling a woman she was helping a man look for a lost dog.
Since then, thousands of tips have come in and a cash reward of $100,000 was offered, but relatives know nothing more about what happened to the freckle-faced youngster whose image is still visible across the province.
"The case is still open, the case is still active," Provencher said in an interview from Trois-Rivieres, about halfway between Montreal and Quebec City.
Cedrika would now be 11.
After devoting more than a year following up leads and travelling to different provinces, Martin Provencher has handed the day-to-day search operations to his father, Henri Provencher.
"Your life turns upside down," said Martin Provencher, 38.
"But I had no choice but to get back to work and start living my life again, but I'm still very much involved."
Henri Provencher, 63, who is retired, said he devotes all of his time to searching for the missing girl and won't give up until Cedrika is found.
Both father and son have complained that the first days after Cedrika's disappearance were wasted and that the case was not treated with enough urgency because there was no firm lead she had been abducted.
Similar complaints were made by townspeople in Woodstock because the case did not meet Amber Alert requirements to warrant an immediate emergency broadcast.
For an Amber Alert to be triggered, police must believe a child under 18 has just been abducted, consider the child to be in danger of serious bodily harm and have enough descriptive information of a suspect or vehicle.
Henri Provencher suggests there needs to be another type of emergency alert in cases such as his granddaughter's and the Stafford one - something that captures the full attention of a community .
"You can't wait - the minute something like that happens you have to get things going," Henri Provencher said.
"If we had reacted in the first instances that it was the worst possible scenario, perhaps things would have played out differently."
Martin Provencher said it's hard to tell a family what to do in such a situation, but it's important to be involved and be aware of how the investigation is proceeding.
"You can't second-guess yourself," he said. "What you have to do is listen and do what you have to do when the opportunity arises.
"Did we talk too much? Did it cause someone to not come forward? We don't know. We'll never know. What we know for sure is we needed to do something."