Teen’s sister in tears at murder trial of parents
Starved boy’s sister takes witness stand
Seeing video of her brother’s final birthday party brought Alexandru Radita’s sister to tears Tuesday, as the celebration of his 15th year was shown during their parents’ murder trial.
The girl, who can’t be named, was shown a series of family videos by defence lawyer Andrea Serink depicting Alexandru and other members of the Radita clan.
But when video showing her older brother opening gifts at his 15th birthday party in late January 2013 was displayed on courtroom screens, the witness began to cry and had to take a break from her testimony.
The underage witness, whose age is also subject to a publication ban, testified the family, including Alexandru, went on regular outings to museums, shopping and the Calgary Zoo.
“Occasionally we would go ... to the mall, go to the zoo, go out to eat,” she said.
Her parents, Emil, 59, and Rodica Radita, 54, are charged with firstdegree murder in Alexandru’s May 7, 2013, death, a little more than three months after the video was taken.
It’s the Crown’s theory the couple kept Alexandru out of the public eye while he slowly withered away.
The teen died from bacterial sepsis related to starvation and malnutrition, and weighed a mere 37 pounds at the time of his death.
But his sister painted a more joyous picture of Alexandru’s life than the one presented by the Crown, of a boy who died a lonely death that left him skin and bones in the end. “Was he happy?” Serink asked. “Most of the time, yeah,” she replied.
The witness said her brother would do “kid things” like “run around, be a kid.”
“I believe he liked to ride his bike,” she said.
“We’d play, like, sports in the backyard.”
And she said Alexandru only got very sick in the last week before emergency responders found his emaciated body in an upstairs bedroom of their Citadel home.
“Had you seen him that sick before?” Serink asked. “Not that I recall,” she said. “He was kind of sick ... just the daily sickness, I guess.”
She said she remembers police showing up at the family’s home the day her brother died. “It was kind of scary,” she testified. “We just prayed.” Under cross-examination by Crown lawyer Marta Juzwiak, the sister said her parents didn’t believe in doctors, agreeing there was a time she injured her knee badly and her mother just massaged it.
“So when Alex was sick he didn’t go to the doctor, either?” Juzwiak asked. “No,” the witness said. Serink and defence counsel Jim Lutz will present final submissions on Wednesday.
It is the most ghastly video, the one of Alex Radita’s 15th birthday party.
Three months still from his eventual death, he was already stick-thin, so weak he struggled with bird limbs to open the cards and presents as around him, some of his seven siblings squealed with delight, as though all were well in the charnel house and it was perfectly normal to give a teenage boy with red sunken eyes a teddy bear, or to cry “Ohhh, a puppy!,” about a card for him with a dog on it.
In the witness stand Tuesday, one of Alex’s sisters stood in a hooded sweatshirt, watching the video on a screen.
Until this moment, she had been able to carry on as though nothing was awry, in the way that traumatized children can do, must do.
Oh yes, she said, Alex’s mood may have been “kinda a little down,” but that was “probably because he was not feeling the best.”
He was sort of sick at the time, she said, and when she was asked with what, replied, “Like the daily sickness” — a grotesque echo of something the youngsters in the Radita home likely heard as a mantra — and explained that was “when you had a cough or a sore back or something, I don’t know.”
But when she watched her brother on the video, politely saying thanks with his skeletal dignity, the girl’s frail composure cracked, and she wept. Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge Karen Horner called for a short break.
The girl, who is a minor, was called by lawyers for Emil and Rodica Radita, respectively 59 and 53, who are on trial for first-degree murder in the May 7, 2013, death of Alexandru, or Alex, as he was called by his brothers and sisters.
Earlier in the girl’s testimony, the parents accused of starving their diabetic son to death occasionally smiled benevolently in the prisoners’ box, the father several times practically beaming with delight as, on other more benign videos, he watched and heard the sounds of his brood as they giggled and goofed about in the family van.
But the parents’ direct view of their daughter, and hers of them, was blocked by a giant screen.
They were allowed to see her only on a TV monitor.
Alex died of a raging bacterial infection secondary to his malnutrition and untreated and mismanaged Type 1 diabetes. He weighed only 17 kg (37 pounds), with ulcerating sores — holes really — on his ruined body. At the time of his death, he was wearing a diaper.
The girl, her name and age protected by a publication ban, frequently giggled as lawyer Andrea Serink showed her family pictures and played short videos taken in 2010 in the family van, the intent apparently to paint the Raditas as normal and loving.
She was, as Crown attorney Marta Juzwiak gently pointed out, quite young in the early videos, and was a little embarrassed now to see herself in them.
In fact, the family was far from typical, as Juzwiak managed to elicit in her brief cross-examination, when the girl agreed that her parents “didn’t believe in doctors because of religion,” and that none of the children was taken to a doctor when they were ill.
She once dislocated her knee on a trampoline, for instance, and her mother “massaged” it back into alignment, though the girl admitted, with a rueful shrug, that maybe it wasn’t the best way.
Similarly, she said, as Alex grew more ill in the last five months of his life, the parents didn’t take him for medical help.
Alex was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was just a toddler, and had had several close calls in British Columbia, where the family was then living.
He was taken to hospital just hours from death, and B.C. doctors were so alarmed by his parents’ curious resistance both to treating the boy’s diabetes — he required both long- and short-acting insulin — and to getting help only at the last moment that they called in social workers.
Alex was then apprehended for a year, and it was, at least by external measures, the best year of his life — with proper diabetes management and care, he thrived, even grew chubby, and did well at school.
But in 2005 a B.C. judge returned him to his parents’ care, and the careful monitoring of Alex that was supposed to happen didn’t, in part because the parents evaded appointments and in part because in the mix of busy professionals treating him, the boy’s case was lost.
The family moved to Calgary in 2009, a social worker didn’t follow up with a phone call, and Alex never registered on any official radar. He saw no doctors and went to no schools.
The Raditas, through their lawyers, have admitted they “mismanaged” Alex’s care, but are pleading not guilty to murder.
After much hemming and hawing, the defence lawyers finally told Judge Horner Tuesday the girl would be their only witness. Closing arguments begin Wednesday.