Fatal blows are beside the point

OComment ccasionally, when lawyer Nathan Gorham is readying his laptop to show various video clips that are part of the evidence in this case, what pops up as he fusses with the technology is his screensaver, a picture of his two gorgeous small children.

The glimpse is brief, but it leaves an intoxicating impression of big grins and tousled hair and chubby cheeks.

Gorham represents Joel France, who has pleaded guilty to manslaughter by not providing the necessities of life, such as medical care, to the dead child at the centre of the case, Nicholas Cruz.

Though Gorham and cocounsel Joanne Park and prosecutors Michael Cole and Heather Keating have agreed on much, they are quibbling over who did what to the child in question — France or his ex-girlfriend, Marleny Cruz, mother of Nicholas — at a proceeding called a Gardiner Hearing.

The prosecutors are trying to prove that France abused both mother and child and administered the blow that killed Nicholas. He was 26 months old when he died.

Gorham is arguing that Marleny Cruz, who herself pleaded guilty to manslaughter in January, is as likely the culprit and to that end, spent two days this week cross-examining her.

Cruz has revealed herself as one of those young women (she is 29 now) who moves through the world with the invisible V on her forehead that the predatory can spot: She was sexually abused by her father, physically beaten by her stepmother, and unsurprisingly developed an ability to find abusive partners.

In between her last violent boyfriend (he once stabbed her in the back and on another occasion put a curling iron in her vagina and turned it on) and finding France, she managed to somewhat turn her life around.

With a mountain of support arranged by the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, which had taken her two older boys into care and Nicholas, too, at birth, and with virtually every available subsidy known to Canada, Cruz was completing her high school education and had begun to dream of becoming, guess what, a social worker, and had managed to regain supervised control of Nicholas.

She impressed the legion of watchers who kept tabs on her; to a woman, they reported she was good with Nicholas. It appeared to them that she might even be learning to be a real parent.

The social workers didn’t know that Cruz was still leaving Nicholas alone in his crib while she popped over to a neighbour’s to watch movies. They didn’t know that she “blazed,” or smoked weed. They didn’t know that one day, shortly after meeting France, she left her dog (naturally, a pit bull named Tyson) locked in his crate for 24 hours. They didn’t recognize her curiously stunted emotional range.

And she never told them she’d moved in a new man.

Cruz was on the brink of regaining full custody of the little boy when she met France.

From her diminished perspective, he must have had it all going on — he’s tall and attractive, unemployed (his alleged career as a “security guard” consisted of about three weeks on the job before he quit, or as a colleague jokes, just long enough to get the cute uniform) and was about a month away from being evicted when they met in mid-May of 2013.

Icing on the cake, he liked to call her a slut and a bad mother and whack her around; when Nicholas died and she and France were interviewed by Toronto Police, she had bruises on her face and small body to prove it.

France called her “Empress.” At some point, he gave her a promise ring. They talked of having children together and indeed, so they did — Cruz gave birth to her fourth child, by France, in February of 2014; the boy was seized by the CCAS at birth.

Within a week of meeting, France and Cruz were an item; within five weeks, he had moved into the townhouse she shared with Nicholas.

Within another three weeks, Nicholas was dead of shock secondary to grave intestinal injuries.

It’s important, of course, to France’s sentence how Ontario Superior Court Judge Anne Molloy rules on this business of whether prosecutors prove beyond a reasonable doubt that France inflicted the lethal blows.

But none of it matters a whit, really.

Cruz betrayed Nicholas by putting her own interests — that dashing man — ahead of her child’s, a lifelong pattern with her.

In some of her many statements to police or in testimony, she even blamed Nicholas for being clumsy and hurting himself.

France, similarly, didn’t pick up the phone and call an ambulance when, in the last days of Nicholas’ life, he was moaning with pain and vomiting up green bile.

Correctly, Gorham often accused Cruz of lying in her own self-interest to put herself in a better light.

“There is no better light for me, sir,” she replied once.

There is no better light for either of them.