12-year old Karissa Boudreau first disappeared on January 27, after apparently having an argument with her mother, Penny. Penny indicated that she had left Karissa in the car and gone into the Bridgewater, Nova Scotia Sobey’s Supermarket for a few minutes, and that Karissa was gone when she returned to the car.
For most of us, the situation just deteriorated from there. I knew Penny from high school, and she and Karissa used to come to our church for Sunday School when they were living in this area. My first reaction, when the disappearance was reported in the news, was that this was a situation of a girl, smarting from a disagreement, who was temporarily hiding out at a friend’s home to teach her mother a lesson.