"Torture."
That is the only way Bonnie Leights, the mother of missing ex-soldier Katrina Blagdon, can describe her days and nights in Thorold while searching for an answer to what happened to her daughter.
"Every waking moment, all I think is Trina, Trina, Trina," Leights said, in an interview with ThoroldToday. "You go from thinking the worst, to having hope, to asking yourself what happened. Where is she?"
On Tuesday, the family gathered in the parking lot next to Tim Hortons on Ormond Street to put up more missing-person posters—another desperate attempt to discover the truth about what happened on Dec. 31, the last time Katrina Blagdon was seen alive.
A mother of two, the 37-year-old St. Catharines woman was captured on a security camera near Firehouse Subs on New Year's Eve, picking up take-out with her boyfriend. The two drove away in Blagdon's lime-green Jeep.
After that, the trail went cold, and no signs of life such as bank activity or access to social media accounts have been registered.
The family says her house appeared just the way she left it. The only thing missing are her cellphone and the clothes she was seen wearing on the surveillance footage.
"For Katrina to not touch her cellphone after 6:00 or 6:30 p.m on New Year's Eve...it would not happen," Leights said. "Trina never put her phone down."
"She messaged me 'Merry Christmas' on Christmas Day, so why would she not message me on New Year's?"
Her mysterious disappearance has brought her family to Niagara, where they are coordinating the search effort from a rental in Thorold. A wide network of ex-military volunteers and other community members have assisted in a handful of ground searches. Last weekend, a small group scoured the grounds around the Martindale Pond in St. Catharines.
"But the snow hasn't made it any easier to search on the trails, and how can you go off the beaten path in this?" said Shawn Muma, Blagdon's step-father. "It's hard."
Blagdon's mom and step-dad drove more than six hours from their home in the Ottawa Valley and have been here since early January, mere days from the point their daughter was last seen. They don't want to leave, but the nights are making it hard.
“When the dark sets in at night, you know it will be another night when you have to go to bed and not sleep," Leights said. "You open your eyes and wonder where she is, and you just want to scream so loud that the whole world hears you."
A handful of people turned up for Tuesday's effort, hanging flyers around the Thorold area while brainstorming other locations such as the Tim Horton's near Brock University. Their goal is to keep Blagdon's case in the public eye.
"We used to talk about December 22, because that is the date when it starts getting brighter, and this year she said: 'It is all up from here,' " her mother said. "We talked about that. It did not give me any indication that Trina was in a bad place. She wanted to travel, she was looking forward to 2022."
