Man who killed Indigenous woman in northern Alberta released from prison
She says she has been overwhelmed with emotions since Corrections officials told her that 74-year-old Grant Sneesby was freed earlier this month after being granted statutory release.
"I haven't cried like this since (police) told us they found her," she said Friday from her home in Edson, west of Edmonton.
She said she misses her mother, Gloria Gladue, and has a hard time forgetting Sneesby's trial.
"I'm shaking because it's never easy talking about."
Gladue, a member of Bigstone Cree Nation, was last seen in Wabasca, Alta., in October 2015. The remains of the 44-year-old were found in rural Manitoba almost three years later.
Sneesby was sentenced in 2022 to 11 years after being convicted of manslaughter and causing indignity to a body. He was credited seven years for time in pretrial custody.
A December decision from the Parole Board of Canada says Sneesby's statutory release date was pending and that he was planning to live in a seniors home after his release. A spokesperson said it couldn't confirm the release due to privacy.
The law requires federal offenders who have served two-thirds of their sentence to be freed under statutory release.
The parole document says Sneesby told his trial he was drinking with Gladue when they got into an argument and he stabbed her in the chest three times with her knife.
Sneesby's lawyers argued Gladue was the initial aggressor.
The trial heard Sneesby wrapped Gladue's body in plastic, taped both ends and placed her in his trailer. He also destroyed her cellphone, burned her clothing and disposed of the knife.
He moved the trailer twice over the next two years before taking her body to a wooded area in Manitoba.
He told investigators that he last saw Gladue when she left his home to go to a wedding. Officers learned that no one saw her at the event.
In 2018, Sneesby admitted to undercover police officers that he killed Gladue and took them to the place he had left her body.
Nicole Gladue-Weesemat said it was difficult to sit through Sneesby's trial and now, with his release, she's worried again.
But she said it's important to talk about what happened to heal and remember her mother and other missing and murdered Indigenous women.
"We're trying our best to cope and honour her at the same time," she said.
"It's important to keep my mom's story going."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Feb. 28, 2025.
Fakiha Baig, The Canadian Press
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
3 days ago
Blocked from Bolivia's election, ex-leader Morales not sure how to respond to threats of arrest
LAUCA Ñ, Bolivia -- Bolivia's charismatic, long-serving ex-President Evo Morales told The Associated Press on Saturday that he didn't know what to do about threats by the right-wing presidential candidates to arrest him if they came to power. From his stronghold in Bolivia's tropics of Chapare, where he has been holed up for months under the protection of die-hard supporters, he repeated his call for voters to deface their ballots in Sunday's high-stakes elections in defiance of the race from which he is barred due to a contentious constitutional court ruling. 'What are we going to do? Not even I know,' he said in response to questions about how he would respond if either of the right-wing front-runners, multimillionaire businessman Samuel Doria Medina and former president Jorge 'Tuto' Quiroga, wins the presidential election and fulfills their threats to arrest him. 'I am in the crosshairs of of the right-wing empire.' Morales, 65, was charged last year with human trafficking and accused of impregnating a 15-year-old girl when he was president. While he has not outright denied having sexual relations with the underage girl, he has described the charges as politically motivated. A judge issued the arrest order as he and his former finance minister, President Luis Arce, bickered over the control of their long-dominant Movement Toward Socialism Party. As a result of their bitter power struggle, the party splintered. With the Bolivian economy undergoing its worst crisis in around four decades, the implosion of the MAS party has given the right-wing opposition its best shot at winning at the ballot box since Morales first came to power in 2006. 'Look, it's an election without legality, without legitimacy .... without the Indigenous movement, without the popular movement,' Morales, Bolivia's first Indigenous president, contended in his interview with the AP at his political organization's headquarters, where he broadcasts a weekly radio show. The null-and-void vote, he said, 'isn't just a vote for our political movement.' 'It's a protest vote, a vote of anger." He insulted Doria Medina and Quiroga, who have both run for president three times before, losing at least twice to Morales, as 'eternal losers.' Citing widespread voter disillusionment with the options, he expressed confidence that the election outcome would reveal an unusually high proportion of invalid votes. 'No one is going to win. It will be the spoiled vote, which is Evo's vote,' he said, speaking in third person.
Hamilton Spectator
6 days ago
- Hamilton Spectator
City of Vancouver to move roadside memorial to festival victims to cemetery site
Women pause at a memorial during a vigil on a provincial day of mourning for the victims of the vehicle-ramming attack at the Filipino community's Lapu Lapu Day festival last week, in Vancouver, on Friday, May 2, 2025. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Darryl Dyck DD flag wire: true flag sponsored: false article_type: : sWebsitePrimaryPublication : publications/hamilton_spectator bHasMigratedAvatar : false :
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Yahoo
Consumer racial profiling a neglected human rights issue, report says
BELLA BELLA, BRITISH COLUMBIA — Heiltsuk Tribal Council Chief Marilyn Slett says no one in her community is immune to the small acts of racial profiling that can embed themselves in everyday life for an Indigenous person in Canada. "It's my parents going to a restaurant, and it's not a busy time in that restaurant, and they're refusing to serve them," she said. "(It's) myself going grocery shopping in a neighbouring community and having a store employee literally follow me around in the grocery store. These things happen to our community members, our Indigenous people, on a daily basis and it's to some degree being normalized." The behaviour, known as consumer racial profiling, is a neglected human rights issue in Canada that requires proper study, according to a new report written by two well-known Canadian human rights experts. "Recent research and media reports underscore the fact that consumer racial profiling is a deep-seated social phenomenon often with low visibility in our daily round of life where the corresponding adverse social harms routinely go unnoticed or are interpreted as normal practice and so 'business as usual,'" the study released Thursday says. The call for more research is one of a series of recommendations in the report by Lorne Foster and Lesley Jacobs which was commissioned by the Heiltsuk Nation as part of a B.C. Human Rights complaint against a Canadian Tire outlet in Coquitlam, B.C. A father and daughter say they experienced racial profiling and racism while shopping in 2020. Foster said small actions like being followed around, singled out for scrutiny, or closely monitored by a clerk or guard who suspects they may steal, can have a cumulative effect over time, building to a point where someone might go public with their experience, in what he describes as a thousand small cuts. "This goes on for months. It goes on for years. And it actually only builds. It becomes cumulative at that time, and those are the times when you'll see something magnified occur." But the impact goes beyond the individual, he said. "In terms of the community, I think that what we have is a situation where there are entire generations that actually are wounded, and these wounds are transmitted from generation to generation," he said. "And they form a kind of oppression that surrounds this group, generation after generation, which cannot only impact Indigenous mental health, but also emotional and physical health as well." The accusations against Canadian Tire have not been proven. A hearing on the B.C. Human Rights case is expected to take place in October. The complaint alleges that Dawn Wilson and her father Richard Wilson were at the store to shop to get new tires installed when Wilson says a guard with a third party company asked to search her father's backpack, despite other customers also having similar bags. Wilson, a member of the Heiltsuk Nation, says when she raised what happened with one of the store's mechanics, instead of taking the incident seriously, he responded with a racist anecdote. When the pair went public with the complaint last year, Canadian Tire issued a statement saying it takes claims of racial profiling and racism very seriously and they should not happen. The company said the owner of the store "has been actively at the table, co-operating with the tribunal since the claim was filed.' Considering how pervasive consumer racial profiling appears to be, Jacobs said research on the topic is lacking. He said consumer racial profiling doesn't get the same type of attention as alleged profiling by police, for example. "What we're trying to say is that consumer racial profiling for Indigenous folks is so every day that it doesn't tend to have the highlights that (come) when police are involved. There tends to be concerns about police shootings, use of force, all of those kinds of things that accompany police action that often are not involved consumer racial profiling," he said. Foster and Jacobs, whose work includes a more than decade-long study of race-based data collected by the Ottawa Police Service during traffic stops, said data could be collected on consumer racial profiling if major businesses decide to step up. "We look for a leading national bank to work with researchers to begin to collect data so that you can identify whether there are risks of Indigenous consumer racial profiling when people come in to open bank accounts, when they come into cash cheques, whatever that might be, and begin to collect data in those contexts with those willing partners," Jacobs said. "In the same way that in policing, Ottawa's lead then became a model for dozens of other police services across the across the country." Slett said the nation supports all of the recommendations from Foster and Jacobs' report, which also include calls for better education, training and a recognition that restorative justice measures, including healing ceremonies, have an important role in remedying the harm. "For all of us, to some degree, we've experienced the type of discrimination that we're talking about here today, and we know that it needs to stop. We need to be able to talk about this and shine a light on it, and find ways to do things better," she said. This report by The Canadian Press was first published Aug. 14, 2025. Ashley Joannou, The Canadian Press
