Abduction Incident
On November 1, 2007, a Kirkland Lake woman, Brenda Batisse, abducted a newborn baby girl from the SRH's St. Joseph's Health Care Centre site shortly before 1 p.m. Batisse spent several hours in the hospital building, dressed as a nurse, before taking the baby and leaving the premises.
The hospital immediately went into lockdown. A provincewide AMBER Alert was issued, and all highways leading out of the city were roadblocked an hour after the incident. Batisse had already passed a roadblock location. She was subsequently arrested at her home in Kirkland Lake at 8:30 p.m., and the baby was returned to her mother unharmed.
Batisse, an Anishinaabe who had been physically, sexually and emotionally abused by several relatives throughout her childhood, had no prior criminal record and an extenuating mental health background — according to trial testimony, Batisse abducted the baby because her own pregnancy ended in a miscarriage shortly after she was physically assaulted in the summer of 2007, and she feared that her boyfriend would leave her if he found out.
Batisse was eventually sentenced to five years in prison for the abduction. On February 5, 2009, the Ontario Court of Appeal ruled that the sentence was not consistent with the principles established by the Supreme Court of Canada around the sentencing of First Nations offenders, and reduced her sentence from five to 2.5 years.
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