Quebec coroner faults Lévis police search for missing 13-year-old Maëlyne Lugez
A Quebec coroner found Lévis police failed to search adequately for Maëlyne Lugez, 13, found dead in a creek in November 2024. Officers suspended the ground search overnight despite the girl possibly still being alive.
Coroner: Lévis officers suspended overnight search while girl may still have been alive
Lévis police did not take appropriate steps in their search for 13-year-old Maëlyne Lugez, who was found dead in a creek near her school in November 2024, according to a coroner's report published Sept. 14. Ca.news.yahoo.com reports that coroner Luc Malouin questioned why officers halted ground searches overnight during a window when Lugez may still have been alive.
Malouin found that police placed too much weight on the fact that Lugez was considered suicidal and failed to adequately account for a second, equally important element of her profile: she was a missing 13-year-old child. Search protocols for children her age called for isolated areas to be "flooded with mobile resources," he said.
Lugez disappeared on Nov. 6 after leaving school during her lunch break and not returning for afternoon classes. The school contacted her father before calling police. Officers in Lévis, south of Quebec City, initially searched a 300-metre perimeter around the school and attempted to locate her through her cellphone, which had been turned off.
Malouin questioned whether police developed "tunnel vision" after those efforts came up empty. Lévis police testified that 95 per cent of missing youths are quickly found within 300 metres or through cellphone geolocation.
Officers suspended the ground search at approximately 9:15 p.m. citing darkness and fatigue, though investigators continued working the case overnight. One investigator testified that reducing police presence can sometimes allow a suicidal person to return on their own. Malouin rejected that reasoning in this context: "That is true for a suicidal person, but here, in addition to being suicidal, she was a 13-year-old child," he wrote.
Lugez's family and school staff believed she was in the woods and repeatedly asked for a police dog to be deployed. A dog handler later testified that the quiet evening would have been an excellent time to search the wooded area. Quebec provincial police offered the services of a dog handler and its emergency measures division, but the Lévis official in charge declined, choosing to wait until morning.
"At 9 p.m., with the ground search at an impasse, why wasn't that possibility considered?" Malouin wrote.
The search resumed the following morning. At approximately 1:20 p.m. on Nov. 7, Lugez was found in a creek roughly 700 metres from her school, her face submerged in the water. She was later declared dead at the hospital.
Malouin concluded that Lugez drowned accidentally and did not intend to take her own life. He determined that her death "likely occurred late in the evening of November 6 or early in the following night."
The coroner recommended that Lévis police update officers' knowledge of ground-search practices and that Quebec provincial police better inform other forces about the specialized services available to them. In a statement, Lévis police said they are reviewing the report.
Source: Google News CA — Crime (EN)