‘No one is talking to us:’ B.C. woman searching for answers after brother’s death in jail

Kurtis Champagne is seen in this photograph, submitted by his sister.

Warning: This story mentions self-harm and suicide.

Cassie Savage’s brother Kurtis Champagne was 37 when he was taken off life support at a northern B.C. Hospital last month. He was also in the custody of B.C. Corrections, having been arrested and taken to jail just four days earlier.

Savage and her mother were there in Champagne’s final moments, but they are desperate for answers about what led up to his death – which they have been told was from a catastrophic and self-inflicted traumatic brain injury.

“The wounds he had given himself, they were not survivable,” Savage says.

The B.C Coroner’s Service has said it will likely be at least five months before the agency’s mandatory investigation into Champagne’s death is concluded.

Savage says no one from the Prince George Regional Correctional Facility has contacted the family since Champagne died on Feb. 13, despite the multiple messages she has left for the facility’s warden and its family liaison officer.

“Even if the correctional facility couldn’t tell us anything because there’s an ongoing investigation, just tell us that. But acknowledge my brother, acknowledge the situation, acknowledge us,” she says.

“I don’t want my brother’s story to be swept under the rug or forgotten about. This is our way of just trying to get attention to this situation and make sure they know we’re still here, we still want answers – and no one is talking to us.”

The Ministry of Public Safety, which oversees B.C. Corrections, told CTV News in an email that senior management had contacted Champagne’s family twice, to “provide information as appropriate while investigations are underway” and to “offer their condolences.”

Savage maintains that her mother has never spoken with anyone from the jail, and she can’t imagine who else would have been contacted.

Savage did confirm both she and her mother received phone calls from the province last Friday – the day after CTV News first asked the government about Champagne’s death and the province’s policy on family notification – but neither of the women had an actual conversation with anyone.

Asked to provide the dates on which contact was made with Champagne’s family, the ministry refused, citing privacy law.

Savage has been sending emails, making phone calls and filing freedom of information requests since her brother died.

In the meantime, all she knows is what she was told by hospital staff. And what she was told haunts her.

“What the social workers told us when we arrived at the hospital to see him when he was still on life support, is that he was hitting himself – his body, his head – against the cell walls and the cell floor. And he had given himself such a traumatic brain injury that it was unsurvivable.”

Savage says she was told by a neurologist that her brother’s CT scans were among the worst he had ever seen. In the days since his arrest, Savage was also told Champagne had been taken to the hospital on at least two other occasions.

“He was doing the same thing. He was hurting himself. He had to go be seen by a doctor, get scans, make sure he was OK, and then they sent him back to the jail where he continued to do the same thing.”

“What were they doing to prevent him from hurting himself?”

For Savage, that is just one of the many unanswered questions in her brother’s case, which has left her to grapple with the ways in which the system seems to have failed him – and how it might be failing many others.

“How many people out there don’t have someone advocating for them at all? It’s kind of scary to think of how many times that something similar to this has happened and there hasn’t been anyone to ask questions about it,” she says.

Creating more harm?

For advocates like Nicole Kief, with Prisoners Legal Services, this case is “heartbreaking” but not shocking. While not directly involved with Champagne, the organization works with roughly 1,000 people behind bars in the province each year. Kief says a lack of transparency and accountability around in-custody deaths is common, as are issues with the institutional response to suicidality and self-harm.

But one thing about the case stands out first and foremost.

“This is someone who has been in custody repeatedly. And I think this is true of our system – there are people going in and out and in and out, and the system is doing nothing to address their underlying needs, and in many ways creating more harm,” she says.

Champagne, his sister readily admits, was “not a saint.” She made the difficult decision to cut off contact with him long before he died because of his volatility and violence that she says was fueled by an addiction to alcohol.

Champagne’s first criminal conviction was in 2019, for impaired driving. More arrests, charges and convictions would follow. There were “rock-bottom” moments over the years, Savage says, when Champagne would say he wanted to get help, coming to his family in a “begging, broken state.” But due to the long waits for publicly funded programs and the prohibitive costs of private care, he never got treatment.

“He was never violent with anyone, until he started drinking,” Savage says, explaining that her brother has faced multiple charges for assaulting his female partners over the past five years.

Champagne did brief stints in jail, but his offending continued to escalate. His involvement with the justice system in the years before his death did not deter him from committing more crimes. It did not rehabilitate him, Savage says.

On Feb. 9, 2025, Champagne was arrested and charged with assault causing bodily harm, assault by choking, and uttering threats. The victim was his girlfriend, and Savage says she doesn’t doubt that her brother committed the violence he was accused of.

But his life, Savage says, still mattered. And she wants to know how it could end in a horrific and potentially preventable way while he was in the custody of B.C. Corrections.

“Incarcerated people, they’re people, they’re human beings. I believe that if we’re trusting the government to have authority and care over all of these individuals – we need to be able to trust them,” she says.

“These people are in the hands of our justice system. It’s this huge government-funded agency. I think we can expect more from our government, more from our judicial system. We just need to expect more.”

Kief puts it more bluntly.

“We don’t have the death penalty in Canada.”

Families left in the dark

Prisoners Legal Services, Kief says, has a lot of experience working with families and loved ones of people who die in prisons and jails. Savage’s experience, she says, is a familiar one.

“We’ve certainly heard from families that it’s very difficult to get information – particularly directly from the institutions, from the prisons and jails. People are not proactively reaching out to them, are not following up with them. It can be difficult just to get their loved ones’ effects back,” she says.

At the federal level, a comprehensive guide for family members and loved ones of people who die in prison was published in 2021, outlining the notification and investigation process – complete with a checklist and information about how to file a request for records.

Kief says this policy came out of a report from the Office of the Correctional Investigator, a federal watchdog, that highlighted the difficulties families were having getting information following a death.

“Families often face a difficult and protracted process to access information following the death of a family member in federal custody,” the investigation found. “Withholding information leads to unnecessary frustration and distrust and denies families closure as they grieve their loss.”

Provincially, there is no similar guide available for families or loved ones, and searching for information on what the policies and procedures are in these cases yields few results.

The province told CTV News that the policy around next-of-kin notifications is for an official at the jail to notify police, who then notify the family.

“Following the local police or RCMP notification of next of kin, the warden or designate contacts next of kin to offer condolences and assistance, as necessary,” an emailed statement said, adding that there are exceptions.

“In some circumstances the sequence of events within BC Corrections policy may be subject to change. For example, BC Corrections notifies the next of kin if an individual has been transported to hospital due to life-threatening injury or illness, or if next of kin are notified of a death by medical professional/hospital staff.”

More deaths behind bars

The B.C. Coroners Service published a report on deaths in custody last year, looking at data from 2013 to 2023.

Twenty-five people died in 2023, the data showed, a number significantly higher than the 10-year average of 17.

CTV News asked for data from 2024 and was told there were 26 deaths in the province’s jails and prisons last year – which suggests the upward trend previously noted by the BC Coroners Service continues.

Kief says the fact that more people are dying in custody underscores the need to provide more information about these deaths – not only to families, but to the public.

“It’s reasonable to have an expectation that if someone is in custody, they should not go there to die and should not be put in conditions that make their death more likely,” she says.

Roughly 60 per cent of inmate deaths between 2013 and 2023 were classified as natural.

Fifteen per cent were suicides.

However, cause of death was unavailable for 62 of the 69 deaths between 2021 and 2023, because investigations had not been completed when the report was released.

Coroner’s data also showed that 60 per cent of deaths over the decade happened in federal facilities, with the remaining 40 in provincial jails.

When someone dies in a federal prison, the Correctional Service of Canada issues a news release within 48 hours of the next-of-kin being notified. The CSC also produces periodic, in-depth reports about that look at the demographics of who is dying, as well as where and how the deaths occurred.

When someone dies in a provincial jail, however, a public notification is not issued. Barring the coroner proactively releasing data, the public is not informed about the number of deaths in these facilities.

In a statement, the B.C.’s Public Safety Ministry said individual deaths in provincial jails are not reported because different privacy laws apply. An online dashboard that provides data about provincial correctional centres does not have information on deaths, but the province said, “the addition of data related to deaths is currently under consideration.”

Kief says consistent and real-time provincial reporting on the number of deaths would be welcome – as a start.

“It would be really to know the more about the types of deaths, particularly by institution. It’s really important to know how many of these are suicides, how many of these are overdoses so that we can understand what’s causing this,” she says.

If you or anyone you know is struggling with mental health, there are a number of ways to get help, including by calling or texting the Suicide Crisis Helpline at 9-8-8. A list of local crisis centres is also available here.