A new community patrol gearing up to hit the streets of Winnipeg is being led by Indigenous women and family members of one of the victims of a serial killer who’s currently on trial. The group has filed to reserve the name “Morgan’s Warriors” as a non-profit, and they have been working on a community needs assessment to figure out which gaps they could help fill in the city, Kirstin Witwicki said. They’re also still looking to secure funding once everything is in place.
The patrol is being spearheaded by Witwicki and her cousin, Melissa Robinson, who both have experience volunteering with community patrols in Winnipeg. This will not be a new chapter, said Witwicki, who is no longer the co-chair of the Winnipeg Bear Clan, as of the last few weeks. Robinson is also no longer with Bear Clan, she said.
“We had this new vision and we want to make sure we do it in a way that honours not only my cousin but all the other victims of this tragedy that happened but all the other victims of the MMIW2GS crisis,” she said. “And we determined we needed to build something from scratch in a very authentic way. So in order to do that, considering all of our other obligations, we unfortunately had to move on,” she said.
The group’s name is inspired by their cousin, Morgan Harris, who was one of four women killed by admitted Winnipeg serial killer, Jeremy Skibicki. The name is to “honour our cousin Morgan, and to turn our grief into action,” she said, and their slogan will be “helping is healing.” “When we started doing community patrols, it was when we were … needing to find connection in our community, because of some things that were going on in our life,” said Witwicki. “We’ll be taking all the bits and pieces [from] our years of knowledge, patrolling with other patrol group organizations … plus adding some additional things that we’ve uncovered that would be helpful.”
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