2024 homicides: Women and children made up 56% of victims in Ottawa

Women and children made up more than half of Ottawa's slain in 2024, a year of record cases for the city's homicide detectives.

Twenty-five people were killed in 20 cases, breaking Ottawa homicide records previously set in 2016 and 1995.

From pre-almagamation to 2015, the City of Ottawa averaged 10 homicides per year. From 2016, with 24 victims, to 2024, with 25 victims, the homicide average jumped to 15.

The city's population in that 24-year time span also nearly doubled.

In 2024, 40 per cent of homicide victims were female: Six women were killed, and four girls. Sixty per cent of victims were male: 11 men, four boys. Women and children accounted for 56 per cent of all victims.

Nineteen of the 25 victims were racialized, representing 76 per cent of homicide victims.

Thirteen detectives working under two staff sergeants laid charges in 70 per cent of the year's cases.

"It's been a difficult year in the sheer amount of victims that we have had," said Staff Sgt. Jeff Pilon of the Ottawa Police Service (OPS)'s homicide unit.

Femicides front and centre

The OPS became the first police department in the country to call an active homicide investigation a femicide, after years of calls from advocates to recognize and identify the specific circumstances of gender-based violence.

The force has done so twice now. Police may decide to retroactively apply that term to other cases but Pilon said that happens at the macro level of the organization.

"The micro level, [for] the investigative unit, it's a murder, it's a homicide. We are going to investigate it to the nth degree regardless of who our victims are," he said. 

Eight children under the age of 18 were killed in 2024. The unit saw a trend toward younger accused persons too.

"Societally, we have children committing murder and being murdered and it's wrong in so many ways," Pilon said.

Murder police don't typically predict trends. Each case, Pilon said, comes with their own facts, victims, witnesses.

Last year, those included a poker player shot when his midnight game was robbed, a teen fight club turning deadly and an international student in custody for killing a whole household.

"You're dealt the cards that you have at the time," he said. 

Seasoned detectives encountered crime scenes last year that Pilon described as "grisly" and "unconscionable."

In 2020, the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, homicides were down in Ottawa and the unit, much like the rest of the service, was understaffed.

But the calendar marched on: Year after year of more cases, more deaths, more victims — and the same detectives at the scene by night, in the office with victims' families or witnesses by day, and in the courtroom by afternoon.

"It has taken an immeasurable toll," Pilon said.

But all of that work is worth it, Pilon said.

"Being there for the victim and being able to speak for the victim that can't tell the story and try and figure out that story and [find] someone accountable — it doesn't bring someone back," he said.

"But we live in a system of laws and we try and hold people accountable for their actions."