Parents guilty in starvation death
It was during the trial in Calgary of Emil and Rodica Radita, convicted Friday of first-degree murder in the cruel and lingering starvation death of their teenage son Alexandru, that I first met the young man Alex might have become.
The young man I met is the son of a friend's sister.
Like Alex, he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes as a toddler. The insidious disease is particularly tricky to treat in the very young, who tend to be “brittle” diabetics.
But though the two were of an age, Alex had the bad luck to have the Raditas as parents; this young man had devoted and loving parents, and a mother who was ferociously vigilant when he was a baby and needed that, and smart enough to allow him to grow to independence as he got older.
At the Raditas' trial, most haunting were the pictures taken of Alex's 15th birthday party, about three months before he finally succumbed to a bacterial infection secondary to starvation and his mismanaged diabetes.
It was not that Alex was never given any insulin. He just wasn't given enough, though his parents knew how to handle the disease and how to match the grams of carbohydrates to the right amounts of insulin. They simply chose not to do so, despite a dry run in 2003 that saw Alex close to death and which resulted in him being apprehended by child welfare for about a year.
An expert testified at trial that once back in the care of his parents, Alex probably got a little food and a little insulin, enough to hold off diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA, for a time.
Back to the pictures, which showed a wasted, skeletal boy with hollowed eyes and an ulcer (probably, an expert testified, a painful ulcer) on his nose. At death, Alex weighed only 37 pounds (little more than he'd weighed as a toddler), and he must have been close to that then. His arms were like sticks.
In the photos, there were balloons and a big handmade card and a bag of gifts, all of which seemed normal.
But the gifts were in a Bob the Builder bag. Inside was a teddy bear — Alexandru was a 15-year-old, for God's sake.
And he was clearly, nakedly, transparently deathly ill, despite one photo in which, as a doctor later described it, he was “trying to put on a brave face.”
Yet his parents had created this monstrous fraud, into which the other seven Radita children were of necessity, by dint of parental control, participants, that somehow had Alex at the centre of the family as a sort of plucky, perpetual, invalid baby boy.
And when his father belatedly called 911, only after people from the couple's church suggested Alex's purported “resurrection” was on the short-lived side, and paramedics came to the house, the boy they found looked “mummified,” so well and truly dead was he.
My friend's sister's kid, by contrast, is gorgeous — a fit, strong, athletic and handsome young SOB, one of those capable Alberta males who can drive machinery and fix anything. He glows with robust good health.
What he wanted me to know was how much Alex would have suffered, that as a diabetic he would have been exquisitely sensitive to the howling needs of his body, and that it never had to come to this.
Alex's story is, on many levels, the age-old one of good and evil.
On one side were the doctors at B.C. Children's Hospital in Vancouver, the staff there who recognized the curious stubborn refusal of Alex's mother to accept the diabetes diagnosis and a brave social worker named Patricia MacDonald, who stuck her neck out for Alex and nearly had it chopped off.
MacDonald testified at a child protection hearing in B.C. Provincial Court in 2004, when the Raditas were fighting to get Alex back. She and three doctors testified that he would not be safe in his parents' care. Judge Gary Cohen disagreed, returned Alex to his family under a six-month supervision order, and thereafter, until he missed two consecutive appointments in 2009, Alex fell off the radar.
By then, the Raditas had moved to Alberta, where Alex was, as Court of Queen's Bench Judge Karen Horner found Friday, deliberately isolated — not enrolled in school, and he never saw a doctor again.
Horner found the defence argument — neither parent testified and their lawyers called but one witness — that Alex had deteriorated quickly “nonsensical,” and that his death had taken place over months and possibly, even probably, years.
The parents, respectively 53 and 59, were sentenced to life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years, the mandatory punishment.
Dr. Michael Seear, one of the doctors from B.C. Children's Hospital and an expert in malnutrition who also happened to be on duty when Alex nearly died in 2003 and when he was first diagnosed, looked at the boy's birthday party and autopsy pictures.
The boy was found in filth. His bedroom was dirty. A bandage on his leg — he had more than 40 deep, festering wounds on his body at death — was dirty. He was wearing a diaper.
The doctor looked at the pictures. “I mean,” he said, “to call this neglect, I think you need a new word.”
Thanks to Justice Horner, we have the right word now — murder.