Dawn Eva Carisse

Missing since: August 9^th, 2001
Year of birth: 1958
Age at disappearance: 43
Gender: Female
Bio group: Indigenous (First Nations)
Eye colour: Green
Hair: Short brown, parted in the centre
Height: 168 cm / 5 ft 6 in
Weight: 52 kg / 115 lb
Build: slender / thin
Scar: faint, on her left cheek
Last seen: wearing a short-sleeved long pink dress with a faint white flower pattern, a buttoned front, and a draw string that crisscrossed the back. She was also wearing brownish-red closed-toed sandals.

Dawn may have gone to Sudbury or Kirkland Lake to see her children

At that time of her disappearance, Dawn Eva Carisse was a patient of the North Bay Psychiatric Hospital who had been admitted approximately 18 years prior.

Dawn was living with short-term memory loss and was often easily disoriented. Two years prior to her 2001 disappearance, she left the hospital grounds in an attempt to see her children, who were living in the Kirkland Lake area at the time. She was later found hitchhiking along Highway 11 in the opposite direction of Kirkland Lake. Since 1997, Dawn had eloped nine times from the Ward, to be later found by hospital staff walking on the hospital grounds or on Highway 11.

At approximately 5 p.m. on Thursday August 9^th, 2001, at the time when patients of her ward regularly met in a common room for dinner, hospital staff noticed that Dawn was not there, or on the ward. They immediately began a search for her on the hospital grounds and along Highway 11. This met with negative results. The following morning, hospital staff contacted the North Bay Police Service to report that she was missing.

Police conducted a thorough investigation, which included interviews with hospital staff, relatives and friends, and the dissemination of alerts to police partners and the public via the media. Following the media coverage, police received two reports from members of the public of possible sightings of Dawn. Unfortunately, all attempts to locate her were unsuccessful.

Dawn Carisse was known to have a pleasant personality. Based on her past behaviour of previous attempts to leave the hospital, it is possible that she was planning to go see her children. Her children were still living in the Kirkland Lake area at the time. However, she may have been travelling towards Sudbury. The guardians of her children had expressed to her that they were planning to move to Sudbury with the children within a year or two.

Submit a tip

Anyone with information that may help us with this investigation is asked to call the North Bay Police Service at 705-497-5555 (and select option 5 to speak to a police officer) or visit us in person at 135 Princess Street West, North Bay.

For those who wish to remain anonymous, contact Near North Crime Stoppers by telephone toll-free at 1-800-222-8477, or submit a tip online at nearnorthcrimestoppers.com.