AN INQUIRY ON LAX CARE

The death of four-year-old Serenity, and the handling of her case by the provincial bureaucracy tasked with protecting her, should trouble every Albertan. Particularly worrying is the fact it was the Ministry of Human Services that put Serenity into an environment where the girl’s safety was at risk. She and her two older siblings, all First Nations, were in foster care with non-Aboriginal families when the system decided they should be placed with relatives in a kinship care arrangement.

An investigation by child and youth advocate Del Graff found the assessment of the girls’ family caregivers was perfunctory and failed to perform criminal background checks on the couple’s adult children, who lived in the home.

Child Intervention Services received reports the children were bruised, scratched and malnourished within two months of the siblings moving into the home.

The youngsters’ mother, who claimed they were being physically abused and denied food, requested the children be returned to foster care, but the request was denied.

Later, neighbours called police to express concern about the girls’ care, but nobody from the ministry looked in on the children for a year.

Serenity was taken to a central Alberta hospital on Sept. 18, 2014, by a woman who identified herself as the girl’s grandmother. Serenity was airlifted to Edmonton’s Stollery Children’s Hospital for treatment of a traumatic brain injury and was taken off life-support nine days later.

Serenity’s ordeal is heart-wrenching. At the time of death, she weighed just 18 pounds.

Beyond Graff’s dutiful review of the circumstances surrounding Serenity’s death, Albertans need a public inquiry to determine why official oversight was so lax.

Albertans also need to know why it took two years for the medical examiner to determine the cause of Serenity’s death, which still has not been released.

We do know — thanks to the efforts of Postmedia columnist Paula Simons — that Serenity arrived in hospital with “multiple bruises all over her body, some green in colour and others purple,” according to notes made in the emergency room. The notes also describe bruising to the girl’s genitals and anus and the absence of her hymen.

Police have a criminal investigation underway, but again, the lack of progress is lamentable.

A little girl was put into the care of relatives by a government agency and let down by the people paid to ensure her safety.

It is an all-too-common failing of our system for children in care.