Rae Tyler’s smile will be what her family remembers most.
In every photograph — from those as a toddler, to more recent family snapshots of the 33-year-old woman — Tyler wears the same show-stopping grin.
It never disappeared, said her father, Winston Tyler, no matter how difficult things got over the last three years of living in a tent in Saint John.
“Even when it was the worst times, she was always smiling,” her father said. “Because ella she said it’d get better.”
Rae and 35-year-old Jonathan Calhoun were identified by police on Friday as the two people found dead after a fire at a tent encampment on Paradise Row on March 25. Police in Saint John said the cause of their deaths is still under investigation.
“I just want to tell her that I’m so sorry that I failed her and just hold her,” her father said through tears. “I told her every day I loved her, and I’m so glad that the last time that we talked that I did tell her that I loved her, and she told me that she loved me.”
At least five people experiencing homelessness have died in New Brunswick in the last 12 months. Evan McArthur, 44, died in a tent fire in January. Another man lost part of a leg and a foot to frostbite.
It comes as the cost of housing has skyrocketed in the province, and the number of people without a home in the three major cities has nearly doubled since 2021.
Although Rae had been living in a tent for more than three years, her father said it wasn’t a place she wanted to be. She referred to one of the sites where she camped as “death alley.”
She moved into a rooming house last year only to be displaced by a fire. She stayed in shelters on and off, but her mental health and addiction problems caused her to struggle with the rules. That also made it difficult for her to live with her father in recent years, although she had lived with him in the past.
Her father said she wanted to get off the streets, but it was impossible to find a rent she could afford on social assistance.
A Saint John father grieves the death of his daughter who struggled with homelessness
Winston Tyler’s daughter Rae was found dead after a fire at a Saint John tent encampment. For three years, she had been homeless.
“I want people to know that Rae wasn’t just a drug addict on the street,” he said. “Rae was so much more. She was fighting and fighting for something but not getting anywhere because she had nowhere to go.”
A difficult beginning
Life wasn’t easy for Rae from the moment she entered the world. She was born through an emergency C-section, with the umbilical cord wrapped around her neck.
As a child, she was always happy and full of life, always wanting to be around her friends and to take care of them.
In the Grade 8 yearbook at St. John the Baptist-King Edward School, Rae wrote about graduating from high school and taking over her father’s restaurant.
She was proud of her brother, Jack Daigle, who came along when she was nine.
“She’d always play with me,” Daigle said. “When I was young, she would have been a lot older. To just kind of chill out with me and pick me to hang out with her, it was cool.”
Her family noticed a shift in Rae in high school when she began using drugs. It was the beginning of years of struggle with addiction and her mental health.
‘She was really trying’
On a December day in 2016, Rae set fire to her Crescent Valley public housing complex, hoping to “cleanse” items in her home.
She was charged with arson with disregard for human life but was deemed not criminally responsible because she was experiencing psychosis when she lit the fire.
At her court date in January 2017, Judge Henrik Tonning said he hoped she was able to get the help she needed, according to a Telegraph-Journal story about the case.
“She was not being monitored for her mental-health conditions,” the newspaper quoted the judge as saying. “That is not her fault.”
After the fire, Rae was diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder. She was prescribed medication and ordered to abstain from drugs for two years to clear her charges.
Her family saw an improvement during that time, as she lived with her father and worked to get her GED.
“She was really trying,” Daigle said.
But Rae went back to using drugs, and things went downhill.
Winston said she was trying to balance out medication that made her want to sleep all the time.
Ultimately, her family believes she was never able to get over the pain of losing contact with her children, and as her addiction and mental health issues deepened, she found herself living in a tent three years ago.
“To be mentally ill and untreated from 2014 to 2024 is a big reason as to why she was on the street, you know what I mean?” Daigle said. “You get so deep down the hole, you don’t really remember what it’s like not to be in the hole.
“We’re seeing the homeless community, the number of people rise and rise… there’s multiple reasons for that, but people just aren’t getting the help that they need.”
Last year, Rae’s father said she checked herself into the Saint John Regional Hospital because she wanted help for her mental health. She stayed for a week, but her father said she left her because she was afraid she’d be sent back to the Restigouche Hospital Center in Campbellton, where she spent time after setting fire to her apartment complex.
Survival
Rae lived in campsites on Paradise Row, and near Courtenay Bay. Her father would bring her supplies — and often, she’d give them away to someone she felt needed them more.
When her tent caught fire last year, leaving her with serious burns to one of her feet, she knew how to wrap and care for it thanks to training she got into cadets as a teenager.
“I’m guilty as the next person of looking at other people, before all this hit my family, and saying, ‘Just let go. They’re drug addicts. They can’t help themselves. They don’t want help, ‘” her father said.
“What I’d like to be able to say to Rae [is] that I’m sorry, because I’m no better than the other ones that pointed the finger.”
The day after the March 25 fire, in response to questions about the two deaths, Premier Blaine Higgs said it points to the need for legislation that could force some homeless people into addiction treatment against their will.
Called the Compassionate Intervention Act, the government has said it will “empower judges and hearing officers to order treatment for severe substance abuse disorder.”
“Some people just don’t want to come off the street,” the premier said in question period on March 26.
“So are we going to consider that as an acceptable lifestyle and condone it?
“Or are we going to find a way to help them find a way back into homes and into a life that’s worth living?”
A call from the premiere
Winston was furious when he heard those remarks and emailed Higgs to share his family’s story, and to explain that the mental health, housing and addictions support Rae needed wasn’t available.
“I told him that he should be ashamed of himself for pointing at my daughter and saying that she doesn’t want to get off the street, that she didn’t want any help.”
A day later, he said, he got a call from the premiere.
Man whose daughter was found dead after Saint John fire calls out premier for lack of empathy
The day after Rae Tyler and Jonathan Calhoun were found dead following a tent fire, Premier Blaine Higgs said, “Some people just don’t want to come off the street.”
“I didn’t find any remorse even though he said he was sorry,” Winston said.
“He said immediately that he wasn’t going to renounce his statement that people on the street just want to be on the street, because that’s his opinion and that’s how strong he felt about it.”
He described the call as “very disappointing.”
“Very condescending,” he said. “Very upsetting. I’m still upset. I don’t think Mr. Higgs even has any feeling about anything that’s going on.”
When asked about the conversation, Higgs said he extends his condolences to the Tyler family “as I did when we spoke.”
“I am sorry if our conversation added further hurt or distress during this difficult time,” the premier wrote in an emailed statement to CBC on Wednesday. “That certainly was not my intention.”
The premier brought up the conversation with Winston on Thursday at a conference in Ottawa, again emphasizing the government needs to find a way to “convince people to come off the street, when you know they are not capable of making the decision on their own. “
“I knew he would certainly be upset, for good reason,” Higgs said about the call with the father.
“But of course, it’s all kind of things we can do better as a government. I don’t deny any of that because we shouldn’t have this situation.”
Family wants to create memorial garden
Winston is already thinking about how to memorialize his daughter. He’d like to build a garden near the site of the fire on Paradise Row.
“Just make that area clean, and make it so people know that somebody loved somebody there,” he said.
As the seeds in that garden grow, he’ll think of how much joy his daughter took from nature and flowers.
He remembers seeing Rae one summer at his home when the sun was shining, looking up and smiling as the rays touched her face.
“She was just so happy,” he said. “It didn’t take much to make her happy. And everyone touched her, I think she made her happy.”
