As a part of the Toronto Sun series on Canadian urban aboriginals, "Red Road", Mark Bonokoski looks at the life of Alex Jacobs in the story, "The elder and the Native artist". Alex Jacobs went from a young man put into residential school, abused to turning to alcohol. With his daughter's death in Toronto, Alex became a councillor and moved to Toronto to mentor young Native people in the city. Alex is a teacher, elder, pipe carrier and the past President of Project AMIK. Under his presidency in 2002 the affordable housing complex was built.

In May of 1985, Alex Jacobs received a phone call at his Thunder Bay home from Toronto Police Sgt. Bob Crawford, then one of the few Native cops on the force, asking him to come to Toronto to officially identify the body of a young woman found dead in Grange Park.

Toronto was not new to Alex Jacobs. When his reputation as a boy runaway from the residential school in Spanish, Ont. became too predictable, he found himself — at the age of 10 — being hauled south from the Whitefish Lake First Nations reserve near Sudbury, thrown into St. John’s Training School on Toronto’s Victoria Park Ave., and therefore tossed directly into the hands of some of the notoriously abusive Christian brothers whose once secretive scandals are now legendary.