Police oversight agency investigating killing of Merritt mother

B.C.’s police oversight agency is looking into whether police could have done more to prevent the killing of a Merritt mother earlier this month.

The Independent Investigations Office of B.C. confirmed Friday that it had opened an investigation into the Dec. 16 death of 45-year-old Pamela Jarvis. Her husband, Christopher Bernard Jarvis, has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder.

Six days earlier, police had responded to the Jarvis home, when the woman called police saying her husband had broken down the door to get in.

Since Jarvis’s death, Angela Marie MacDougall, executive-director of the Battered Women’s Support Services Association in Vancouver, has written to the province, the IIO and the City of Merritt seeking clarification on how risk assessments are carried out in cases of intimate partner violence.

“We’re in this partisan political moment, where the partisan politics are tapping the sign about tough on crime, and who’s going to demonstrate that they’re the toughest on crime, who’s going to lock them up the longest and throw the key away the farthest,” MacDougall had told Postmedia. “None of that does anything for people like Pamela Jarvis in a practical sense.”

Over the past seven years, 1,329 women and girls have died in Canada in criminal or suspicious circumstances. While 2025 has shown some decrease, recent years have shown an upward trend: there were 221 deaths recorded in 2024, a 46 per cent increase over the 151 deaths in 2019.

In a news release on Friday, the IIO confirmed that “information provided by an advocacy agency raised questions regarding a December 2025 police investigation … into alleged intimate partner violence” before Jarvis’ death.

The IIO said the RCMP had confirmed that the last contact between the victim and police was “several days before her murder.”

The IIO will look into whether police action or inaction may have contributed to Jarvis’ death.

Anyone with information about Jarvis’ death is asked to contact the IIO at 1-855-446-8477 or through the contact form on the iiobc.ca website.

sip@postmedia.com