Once a month, Sereena Abotsway's foster parents would travel from Surrey to downtown Vancouver to visit and buy her dinner. It wasn't a pretty affair. Ms. Abotsway, a drug-addicted prostitute, would order an expensive steak, then struggle to chew it with her few remaining teeth.
Five years ago, she was beaten into a coma by a man she refused to identify. Her foster parents, Bert and Anna Draayers, kept a hospital vigil, and eventually she recovered.
But there was no happy ending for the troubled, dark-haired woman who arrived at the Draayers's house at age 4.
Last August, when she was 29, she stopped calling home. The Draayers, who had been planning a 30th birthday dinner, feared the worst. Until then, Ms. Abotsway had been calling nearly every day to talk about the dinner.
The Draayers called downtown hospitals and, eventually, the police. Soon, Ms. Abotsway was added to the list, which would grow to 50 names, of women who had vanished from Vancouver's Downtown Eastside since the early 1980s.
Mr. Draayers said the family braced for bad news. By then, police were already saying they suspected a serial killer was at work on Vancouver's skid row, preying on drug-addicted prostitutes.
Still, when police arrived at the Draayers's home last Friday to tell them Ms. Abotsway had been killed, the family was devastated.
"They said they have evidence that she is no more," Mr. Draayers said in an interview. The officers were from the RCMP-Vancouver Police task force that is investigating the disappearances. Three hours before they visited the Draayers, they had arrested Port Coquitlam, B.C., hog farmer Robert William Pickton, 52, and charged him with two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of Ms. Abotsway and Mona Wilson, 26.
Mr. Draayers said there is some relief in having an answer to her disappearance but added that that knowledge doesn't mitigate the many tragedies that befell Ms. Abotsway in her short life.
He said she was severely abused before she arrived at the Draayers, adding that he couldn't elaborate because the person who inflicted the harm is still alive. "Sereena was definitely damaged," he said. She lived with the Draayers until age 17 and called them Mom and Dad.
Sereena was "a lovely child with a lot of good in her. She always had a good word for someone. She was very caring."
When she reached her teenaged years, Ms. Abotsway became more difficult to handle, Mr. Draayers said. At 17, he and his wife felt they had to ask her to leave because she was disrupting the lives of their other children.
Ms. Abotsway went to live in a group home where she was introduced to street-wise teenagers and began her downward spiral.
She maintained contact with her foster parents and siblings throughout her adult life. Whenever she phoned home, the first thing she asked was news about her siblings and their children.