As Kugluktuk’s 10 p.m. sun shines through her living room window, 29-year-old Megan Klengenberg is monotone and numb as she tells the story of how she became a single mother and widow a little more than a month ago.
It was a cool July evening when Klengenberg left her three young children with a babysitter and went out with friends in the Nunavut community.
A few hours later, she got a call.
Her spouse, Justin Pigalak, had come home drunk and aggressive and tried to get in the house. When the babysitter locked the door, he broke a window. That’s when the babysitter called the RCMP.
Klengenberg says no one came.
Klengenberg came home, put her children in her truck and parked up
the road. She says she was scared of what Pigalak would do to her and
her children, but also to himself.
She says that’s what she told police, calling them six times over a span of the next three hours while Pigalak was in the house. Nobody ever came to help, she said.
“I told them my kids were crying and we were scared. We didn’t really have a place to go.”
The next morning, after staying at a relative’s house, Klengenberg and her three children went home.
She found Pigalak lying in their bedroom. He’d taken his own life.
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