Fifteen-year-old Tina Fontaine was pregnant at the time she was killed.
That's just a smidgen of what her older brother Charles revealed during an interview last week with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) in which he delivered a carpet bombing of details about Tina's sad life, horrific death, dysfunctional family and possibly murderous associates.
He blamed his and Tina's mother for getting Tina hooked on the hard drug crystal meth and into prostitution. He said his mother told him she was disowning him and "that if she ever sees me she's going to beat the shit out of me just like she did to Tina."
This provides confirmation of a statement made a year ago when the Winnipeg Free Press interviewed Thelma Favel, who raised Tina Fontaine, on the Sagkeeng Reserve from when she was a child.
"... Fontaine claimed she had been beaten up by her mother and even texted pictures of her face, (Favel) said." (Winnipeg Free Press, Aug. 29, 2014)
Brother Charles Fontaine said he believes that someone in "the meth scene" is responsible for her death.
What he then said cannot be verified, but if true, it shines a light on where the police investigation into the girl's unsolved killing is going.
Tina's brother said he has heard that she was tortured before her death. "Her hair was ripped out, she was burned, stabbed, beaten, raped, put in a body bag still alive. And drowned."
Charles, now 20, matter-of-factly spoke about the incredibly dysfunctional life that embraced Tina Fontaine.
- He was separated from her and her sister as a baby and put into foster care. Like Tina, he became a meth user.
- His father, Eugene, was beaten to death by "friends" with whom his father had been drinking and using drugs.
- His mother has admitted smoking marijuana with Tina in the weeks before the girl's body was discovered in the Red River.
- One aunt is a known prostitute.
- He himself is a male prostitute.
- A cousin has been charged with forcing a teenaged girl into prostitution at a residence on Furby Street which is rented under another aunt's name and where Tina spent a weekend before her death.
The brother said what worries him now is that his youngest sister is "pregnant and she's 15."
The family tradition lives on.