About 10 years ago, Christopher Newton started acting strangely.
Newton, then 23 years old, began speaking unusually loud and wandering at night, according to his mother Christine Moore.
One day Newton called her and said he was in the middle of a field and he was carrying the cross of Jesus, which he said was too heavy. He was scared, and sent her a video of his hands. "Mom, can't you see the nail holes in my hands?"
Moore thought her son had started taking drugs. When she broached this with him, he denied it. She got him into a drug treatment program near their home in Edmonton.
"Christopher kept saying, 'I don't have a drug addiction,'" Moore says. "And he kept pleading to us that his mind was different than ours, and he felt his mind was more powerful than ours, that he had a connection where God used him to deliver a message."
It would be several years before Newton received a medical diagnosis of schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, Newton gradually slipped into a life of homelessness, crime and poverty, first in Edmonton and then for five years in Nelson until he vanished in August 2024.
Inspector Jason Jewkes of the Nelson Police Department told the Nelson Star that the department is actively investigating the disappearance and is following up on numerous tips from the public.
Moore says she will never stop searching.
"Chris is more than his struggles. He is loved. He matters. And I will never stop searching for him."
School years and a move to Nelson
During his school years Newton was a high-functioning student and athlete. He was captain of a hockey team, he loved playing baseball, and he was an advanced skateboarder. He did all these things with great enthusiasm, Moore says.
At 17 he quit hockey because the late nights and early morning practices would get in the way of graduating with the marks he wanted.
"He was incredibly driven when it came to his education. He was very inquisitive. He always wanted to learn more."
Newton was in French immersion throughout school and fluent by the time he graduated. He had an entrepreneurial side, and after graduating he started a business as an arborist in Edmonton.
Moore says her son was very connected to his grandparents, and was a loving big brother to his two siblings who are considerably younger.
"I never forced that upon him, to be that nurturing person, but he just was."
In Edmonton, Newton's arborist business eventually fell apart as he lost control of his life. Moore set him up in an apartment but he insisted on living outside in a tent.
There was nothing Moore could do about this. Her son was an adult who refused to allow her to intervene.
Newton decided he needed a new start. He had been to Nelson and loved it, so in 2019 he moved here.
After being arrested for squatting at a property in Balfour he went to jail for breaking and entering. This began a series of incarcerations including several for car theft. Eventually the court ordered a psychiatric evaluation and Newton gave the doctor permission to talk to his mother.
"That's when the psychiatrist told me that he was clinically diagnosed with schizophrenia," Moore says, "and it was not drug-induced schizophrenia."
She believes this was the first time he had been examined by a psychiatrist.
Moore felt a lot of guilt, she says, because she had been focused on drug addiction. She had not been fighting for the right care.
But privacy legislation in Alberta and B.C. doesn't allow anyone but doctors to obtain medical information about an adult patient, or get involved in their care, without the patient's permission.
Newton established himself in a tent near the CP Rail tracks in Nelson where he lived for several years. He told his mother in Edmonton that he felt at home in his camp.
"He would tell me how much he loved Nelson. He told me that he was working with the [Coordinated Access Hub] because his body was in so much pain, back pain, things like that, that they were working to get him on some disability benefit."
The Coordinated Access Hub was a refuge that offered a range of services including an overdose prevention site, access to various health resources, an employment program and housing assistance. It was closed in February 2024 when it lost its federal funding.
Moore would get text messages from her son telling her how kind and helpful the Hub staff were, and asking her not to worry because there were nurses who checked on him.
Newton was given medication for schizophrenia, which worked well when he was on it.
"That's when he would call us and walk us around the lake in Nelson, show us videos of his camp and how much he loved it, and he talked so much about the people at The Hub. He talked about Stepping Stones, and how he loved to drop in there, and just how good the people of Nelson were to him."
Eventually Newton did start taking drugs. He told his mother that crystal meth was the only thing that calmed his mind and gave him peace.
Moore was glad for the times her son spent time in jail or at the psychiatric ward at the hospital in Trail, because she knew he was safe there and he would call her every day.
Then he would be released back into the same situation and there was nothing Moore could do about it.
Each time Newton returned from jail or the hospital he found his camp ransacked, but he re-made it. Then one day he found his belongings completely gone and the site levelled, covered with earth by a machine.
"I was told that it was policy and law," says Moore. "He was too close to the railway. But I don't understand that, because in four and a half years of him living there, it wasn't an issue."
Not long after, Moore heard that her son had been seen sleeping on Ward Street. She never saw him again.
Advocacy, anger, and a tightrope
Moore says that in recent visits to Nelson she has interacted a lot with the city's unhoused residents.
"Do you know how the houseless population embraced us when we went to Nelson? Do you know how many of them hugged me and cried with me because they want to know where Christopher is?"
Moore gets angry when people post photos of Nelson homeless people on social media pages in order to deride and insult them, and who verbally abuse them in comment sections.
"There is a family behind every single one of those people," she insists. "How dare you treat them as garbage. And how dare you look at my son and the rest of them as nothing. What if it was a brother or sister reading that about their loved one?"
Recently Moore has been posting lengthy accounts of her search on social media, with many stories and photos of her son from various times in his life. The posts have been shared so widely that they have had 5.3 million views in Facebook. Many parents, not just from Nelson, have reached out to her, sharing their own similar stories.
Moore says she doesn't know the answer to the problem of not being allowed to have input into her son's care.
"I am angry because I believe that if we, his family, had been included in his care, Chris would not be missing. Privacy laws shut us out when he needed us most, leaving him to navigate a world that was not built to support him."
Moore says these days she "walks a tightrope between hope and loss."
Sometimes she momentarily forgets her son is missing.
"Then it hits me — he’s missing. Will I ever hear his voice again? See him? Hug him? The weight of those questions is unbearable, but I carry them because I have no other choice."
