Edmonton boy’s death confirmed as homicide
The death of a sevenyear-old boy in a south Edmonton apartment has been declared a homicide, and the child’s mother is expected to be charged in his death.
Police found the boy after being called to the two-storey Chateau Apartments in a culde-sac near 109th Street and 53rd Avenue at about 8:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Acting Insp. Malcolm Allan said the boy’s mother called 911 to report her son was in medical distress. Paramedics then went to the first-floor apartment and contacted police before taking the boy to University of Alberta Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.
The child’s father was not home at the time.
“It was a very suspicious, very tragic set of circumstances that we discovered inside,” Allan said, speaking to reporters outside the scene in the Pleasantview neighbourhood on Tuesday morning.
Homicide unit Staff Sgt. Bill Clark said Tuesday evening the death had been determined to be criminal in nature. The mother was still being interviewed by police investigators, and Clark said she was expected to be charged within 24 hours.
Despite reports the boy drowned, police would not confirm the cause of death. An autopsy was scheduled for Tuesday afternoon.
Clark said police are also in contact with the boy’s father and 10-year-old sister, both of whom he described as “extremely distraught.”
Neighbour Ping Xiong said she saw the boy Mon- day night, and was shocked to hear that he had died, and that his mother was in police custody.
“I wouldn’t expect that could happen, because I saw her with her children ... She seems to be very nice,” she said.
Xiong said the boy’s mother is in her early 30s, and moved to Canada from Colombia about five years ago. The woman told Xiong recently that she was working part-time at Superstore, and Xiong described the woman as being “very normal,” and said her two children were quite wellbehaved.
Though the two women were not close friends, Xiong said they spoke in the hallway a few days ago. With a young baby herself, Xiong said she asked the woman if it was easier having older children. Xiong recalled the woman saying, “No, not always, because if you make some food maybe they don’t like it.”
“It’s so shocking,” Xiong said. “I can’t believe it’s happening.” A man and woman who arrived at the apartment late Tuesday morning told news media they were relatives. They embraced each other as they spoke with police at the scene, and left without speaking to reporters about 20 minutes later.
Neighbour Jessica Lakeman lives in a suite one floor above the apartment unit that was the focus of Tuesday’s police investigation. She said the family moved in less than a year ago, and that she often saw the mother leaving the apartment with her kids in the morning, presumably walking with them on the way to school.
“The kids were always happy and smiling when you’d see them in the hallway. The mom was always very nice and smiled, and so was the dad. They seemed like nice people,” Lakeman said. “They were sweet kids. They held the door if you needed them to, always said ‘thank you’ any time you opened the door for them. They were always very polite.”
She described the news of the boy’s death as “devastating.”
After being called to the scene, police went door-todoor questioning residents.
Police remained at the building on Tuesday evening, with officers still stationed outside the door of the family’s suite.
Martin Karcher, who lives in the apartment next door to the family, said he was shocked to get a call from a friend who told him, “The crime scene police are here. Somebody died.”
Karcher said he heard a child or children making noise as he left for work around seven or 7:30 a.m., and was surprised to hear kids making so much noise so early in the morning.
But he said it sounded to him like the kids were playing or happy. He said he couldn’t tell what apartment the sounds were coming from.
Edmonton Public Schools confirmed the boy who died is a Grade 2 student.
The school will have a critical incident support unit available Wednesday that includes counsellors and social workers, according to the public school district. It won’t provide details about which school the boy attended, because the incident is under police investigation.