‘NOT CRIMINAL IN NATURE’
RCMP charge caregivers but rule Serenity’s death is ‘not criminal’
She stood up.
She spoke out.
It wasn’t easy for a young Indigenous woman who’d already overcome addiction, survived spousal abuse, lost three children to the child welfare system and succeeded in getting two of them back.
But she wanted justice for the child she’d lost forever. She wanted justice for her Serenity.
And so she did what she’d been told not to do.
She went public.
“If I hadn’t sent you the paperwork, if I hadn’t spoken up, they never would have done anything,” Serenity’s mother told me Friday morning. “But I had the proof.”
RCMP announced Friday they had laid a charge of failing to provide the necessaries of life against Serenity’s guardians, her great-uncle and great-aunt. It’s a charge that carries a maximum penalty of just five years. The couple were released on bail Thursday.
The four-year-old First Nations child from central Alberta died in September 2014, after suffering a catastrophic head injury, deep hypothermia and severe malnutrition. Late Friday, the RCMP said that “after a thorough investigation, it was determined that the specific injury which caused Serenity’s death was not criminal in nature.”
“That one charge. It’s not enough,” Serenity’s mother told me. “I’m happy Serenity got some justice, don’t get me wrong. But it’s definitely not fair.”
Yet, in truth, I doubt any charge would have been laid without this young mother’s courageous persistence.
Last November, Alberta’s child and youth advocate, Del Graff, issued a disturbing report into the death of an unnamed fouryear-old. Graff gave the child the pseudonym Marie. I wrote a column about Graff ’s report, bemoaning it provided so little detail. The next day, I was contacted by a woman who identified herself as the girl’s mother. She told me her daughter’s real name was Serenity.
Then, she faxed me Serenity’s medical records — notes made by doctors in the small rural hospital that first treated the child, notes made by the doctors and social workers who saw her later at the Stollery Children’s Hospital.
Those records revealed the degree and the nature of the abuse was more grave, more shocking than Graff ’s original report had indicated.
Serenity’s mother told me Graff ’s staff had instructed her not to contact the press. But after she read my column, she wanted me to know the whole story.
If Serenity’s mother hadn’t been determined enough to speak, none of us would ever have known Serenity’s full story.
We wouldn’t have known how badly child welfare and Alberta Justice and the RCMP had bungled this file, from start to finish.
There would have been no newspaper headlines. No questions in the legislature. No new minister of Children’s Services, No all-party child welfare committee.
If Serenity’s mother hadn’t trusted me with those pages and pages of medical evidence, if she hadn’t spoken out, I truly wonder if the RCMP would ever have charged anyone with anything.
It would be easy to be angry now with Alberta’s Crown Prosecution Service, given that the only charge arising from Serenity’s case is failing to provide the necessaries of life, a relatively minor offence. But three years on, I doubt the Crown had much choice.
If I hadn’t sent you the paperwork, if I hadn’t spoken up, they never would have done anything.
This is a case where an understaffed, dysfunctional medical examiner’s office took more than two years to complete an autopsy report. A case where Children’s Services failed to hand over key internal investigative documents to the RCMP — until Serenity’s mom went public with her story. A case where many of the witnesses were children, whose memories, three years later, may be cloudy or unreliable.
This week’s news did provide some solace for Serenity’s surviving older siblings, who also endured the conditions of that home.
“When I told them, they just sort of sat there,” their mother told me. “Then, slowly, they started to have a bit of a smile like I’ve never seen before. They looked relieved.”
But we shouldn’t feel relieved. Child welfare workers placed Serenity with this couple and kept her there despite allegations of abuse. They closed Serenity’s file. They abandoned her. Will anyone be accountable for those decisions? Or for failing to turn those critical documents over to the RCMP in a timely fashion? We’ll probably never know. For Serenity’s mother, this week’s development is painfully bitter sweet.
“There’s no way my daughter and my other kids should have been pushed to the back burner for so long.”