Surprising Ashley Smith video shown
TORONTO— For the third time that July afternoon, the correctional officers and nurses walked out of the small medical room at the Joliette Institution where Ashley Smith was restrained to a bed.
As they filed out, despite the restraints, Ashley managed to raise herself up on her elbows and look around. She was alone. She lasted perhaps 15 seconds.
Then, in her childish, bossy voice, she barked, “I need to change my tampon!”
“Not now,” someone replied from outside the room.
“Yeah!” said Ashley. “Melanie, I need to change my tampon!”
For all the legitimate questions there are about that day — Ashley was injected five times with antipsychotics, though she didn’t appear psychotic in the slightest, all of the drugs prescribed over the phone — a couple of home truths remain.
The first is that Ashley emerged entirely unhurt.
On one level, the picture emerging from video clips now being played for the jurors in the Ontario coroner’s inquest examining Ashley’s death is simply dreadful — the teenager, surrounded on her bed of pain by tactical officers in black gear with helmets and shields, people barking out orders in French and English amid the cacophony of clanging metal and crackling hand-held radios that is the music of prison. But she was fine. The second truth is that if you knew Ashley as these jurors by now know Ashley, it is also pretty ding-dang clear that she probably was having the time of her life.
The 19-year-old suffered from a severe anti-social personality disorder with florid borderline features.
It was a hellish mental illness, both for Ashley (personality disorders are difficult to treat, and while she wasn’t delusional or psychotic, she had virtually no insight into the fact she was ill) and for those enmeshed with her, such as prison staff, because she was such a gaping maw of need.
The diagnosis meant she was impulsive and manipulative, could be irritable and aggressive or charming and sly, craved attention and control, and feared any sort of abandonment.
By this time, Ashley had also been in some form of segregation, whether in the youth justice system in her native New Brunswick or the federal adult system to which she was transferred, for years.
Her human contact, such as it was, consisted primarily of her dealings with correctional officers (COs) and other prison staff. And rough as the contact sometimes was, she appears to have grown to need, want and like it enough that she actively sought out ways to draw the guards and others into her cell.
And, at Joliette, Que., on July 22, 2007, about three months before she asphyxiated at another prison in Kitchener, Ont., Ashley managed to rule the roost, sucking up staff and resources.
She destroyed some fixture in her segregation cell and was believed to have hidden the metal pieces in one or another of her body cavities, a longestablished habit. Her security gown was heavily spotted with blood. She was seen playing with electrical wires in her hand. Twice, she threw liquid, whether toilet water or something else, at her cell window.
On two occasions, as she struggled with members of the emergency response team, the audio on the camera captured her summoning up a great wad to spit.
According to nurse Melanie Boucher, who took the witness stand Wednesday, things were so bad she was on the phone with the oncall doctor by 11 that morning.
The psychiatrist prescribed what turned out to be the first of five orders for “chemical restraints,” powerful drugs that were intended to sedate Ashley.
Now this doctor hasn’t yet testified, but given that Boucher’s descriptions of Ashley’s behaviour (she once described her as being in a “feverish state,” which is surely a stretch) didn’t match what the video shows, it is reasonable to wonder if the psychiatrist won’t feel a tad misled.
In any case, the doctor hatched a plan: Ashley would either co-operate or be drugged until she was calm, then transported to a nearby hospital (and, Boucher said, the doctor told her Ashley “was not to know she was being taken to a hospital”), presumably for a body cavity search.
From a total of eight hours of video — all socalled “uses of force” are recorded in Canadian prisons — coroner’s counsel Marg Creal is playing about three hours of excerpts for the jurors.
Through the clips played Wednesday, Ashley is clearly conscious throughout. She squalled frequently that a guard was pulling her hair or hurting her arm, yet Boucher’s frequent checks and taking of vitals revealed no injury or difficulties.
The injections, most of which were meant to be fast-acting, appeared to have virtually no effect upon her.
“Are you tired?” someone would always ask after an injection, or, optimistically, “Are you drowsy?”, or “Are you feeling better?” Each time, Ashley snapped, “No!”, and once she replied, “Let me off this and I’ll feel better!”
At least twice, when the guards would file out of the room post-injection, the nurse urging Ashley to remain calm, she was able to wriggle a hand free. Once, she was able to loosen one of the leather straps and start playing with the metal underside of the bed.
At one point, someone in the crowd of staff in the small room said wearily, “For the inmate, this seems like a game.”
It was, of course, just that for her — this disturbed girl, doing anything she could to get those COs back into that room, suffering through the needles in her thighs and the restraints and the handling.
Boucher’s shift ended shortly after she gave Ashley the fourth injection. The last thing the jurors saw on video was the new nurse giving Ashley a gentle head massage, stroking her hair. The teenager was smiling, Boucher said. Her replacement spoke poor English. Ashley was amused.