A Prince George businessman, concerned that another young woman has gone missing along Highway 16 between Prince Rupert and Prince George, launched a website Friday to raise public awareness of seven teenagers and young women who have disappeared or been murdered since 1990 along the so-called Highway of Tears.
"This is not just a small thing happening," Tony Romeyn said in an interview. "Whether it's a single predator, it's difficult to say. But I thought this is something we need to explore further."
Romeyn, 65, read the story this week about Tamara Chipman, who vanished as she was hitchhiking on the highway near Prince Rupert. She had a two-year-old son, who is being cared for by the child's father.
Romeyn checked Thursday to see if the term Highway of Tears had been taken as a website domain name. When he found it was still available, he registered the name and launched the website (www.highwayoftears.ca/).
He has already posted photographs of Chipman and Nicole Hoar, a tree-planter from Alberta who went missing on June 21, 2002, but is seeking more photos and details of each case.
"I run a company that sells tree-planting and forestry equipment," said Romeyn, who recalled the massive search for Hoar at the time of her disappearance.
Romeyn has established other websites in the past -- Doors of Hope, to help crime victims, and Windows of Hope, for cancer victims. The latter site, he said, is being developed to allow cancer victims to be able to talk to family via a webcam while they are in cancer treatment away from home for extended period of time.
"A local woman with a brain tumour had to go to Vancouver for six weeks of treatment and she had five kids at home and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be nice if she could see her kids,' " explained Romeyn.
He and his wife of 41 years, Rina, have two grown children and six grandchildren. In the mid-1980s, he went with his family to live in the Philippines for four years to work on community development projects, trying to boost agricultural income and reduce child malnutrition.
When he returned to Prince George in 1989, he joined the RCMP as a civil victim services volunteer, doing crisis intervention cases. So he has witnessed the devastation a death can bring to a family, he said.
"This is a girl who's loved by her father, stepmother and family. She's loved by all her family," Chipman's aunt, Lorna Brown, told reporters during a press conference at the Terrace RCMP detachment.
Terrace RCMP Staff Sgt. Eric Stubbs said police are concerned that Chipman seems to have vanished without a trace and without contacting family members.
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