Judge slams child-care workers in toddler’s death
LeReverend’s assessment never outlines options for improving foster-care system
“Kawliga Potts’ death was a direct result of the fundamental failure of everyone connected with this child to do their jobs. No one followed the rules and procedures that were in place.”
That’s the blunt conclusion of provincial court Judge Ferne LeReverend in a fatality inquiry report released Friday by Alberta Justice.
Kawliga was a three-year-old First Nations child, beaten to death by his Edmonton foster mother, Lily Choy, a registered nurse and MacEwan nursing instructor, in January 2007. Choy was convicted of manslaughter in 2011, a conviction upheld by the Court of Appeal in 2013. She was sentenced to eight years.
It’s rare to see a judge be so specific, so candid, in her criticism of front-line child welfare workers.
But, as LeReverend makes clear, a shocking combination of incompetence, negligence and basic bureaucratic buck-passing by child care workers set Choy up to fail, and sent Kawliga to his death.
Choy was a single mother of two young children. She’d spent the last 10 years living in Switzerland. She had fled that country, without telling the fathers of her children, both of whom were fighting her for access. One father had tracked her down in Edmonton and was fighting her for custody here.
Choy didn’t mention that when she applied to be a foster parent. No one checked her references. Instead, she was sent for seven hours of orientation and training. Evaluations of her raised questions about her suitability to be a foster parent. Nonetheless, she was approved to run a foster home with the help of a live-in nanny. But she was only allowed to care for children over the age of five, and she wasn’t allowed to care for any children with special needs. She was only allowed two foster children at a time.
Instead, a social worker, panicking to find a placement, placed Kawliga in Choy’s home, even though he was under five and had complex special needs. The social worker later testified she didn’t know Choy was a single parent and wasn’t licensed to care for a child like Kawliga.
“I was responsible for the child’s file and not the foster home file,” she told the judge.
Less than a month later, three more children, ages 10 to 14, were sent to live with Choy. (She was approved for the overload after her case worker filed papers with inaccuracies — or outright falsehoods — about the home.)
In all, five different, unnamed children’s services case workers were working with the household.
Five different case workers ignored repeated reports that Kawliga was being abused, reports that came, not just from the older foster children, but from the boy’s own doctor. Instead, the older kids were told by their case worker to call the child advocate themselves to complain about the abuse of Kawliga.
Five different workers failed to remove him, although several saw his bruises.
Five different workers failed to shut the home, despite abundant evidence Choy was in crisis, calling her worker 10 times a day, going through four different nannies in two months.
“None of the workers addressed their minds to what needed to be done to save Kawliga Potts,” said the judge.
Despite that, an internal special care review report into Kawliga’s death singled out his social worker for special praise, complimenting her for “exceeding policy expectations” in spending time with him. (Another review panel has been appointed to do another review — a decade after the toddler’s death.)
The judge could have recommended more rigorous screening of prospective foster parents. She could have proposed a better protocol for licensing foster homes. She could have addressed issues of foster home shortages, or worker caseloads.
She didn’t. Indeed, LeReverend, having lambasted the care workers for their many failures, failed in her core duty. She just cut and pasted a few paragraphs from a guest column that ran in the Edmonton Journal this past January.
That column, by Calgary social advocate Tim Richter, was good. But Richter’s essay was a highlevel overview of the child-welfare system, broad and general. It didn’t, and couldn’t, address the specific system failures that killed Kawliga. For LeReverend to repurpose Richter’s words, instead of dealing with the actual evidence she heard, seems a cop-out.
But Richter, more charitably, wonders if LeReverend was just expressing her own frustration and resignation by opting not to add yet more recommendations to the hundreds of other recommendations, made by other judges, and ignored, while children go on dying.
“What’s the point of making recommendations if nothing happens?” he said Friday. “There are such obvious things that need to be fixed. But we just keep kicking the can down the road, with more panels, more reviews, more committees.”
Deputy premier Sarah Hoffman issued a written statement Friday to The Canadian Press.
“As Judge LeReverend notes, while the rules and procedures necessary to ensure appropriate foster care were in place, they were not followed. This is unacceptable,” she said via email.
“When our child protection system falls short, we need to ask ourselves why, and take action to prevent tragedies from happening again.”
Sure we do. So why don’t we?