SYMPATHETIC PORTRAIT PAINTED OF MOM CHARGED IN SON’S DEATH
She was an “over-nurturing” mother, her biggest flaw that she loved her boy so much she leaned toward being too protective.
Her boy was a robustly healthy child with an imaginative mind, a quick intellect and a sweet, respectful demeanour.
To some of the people who know Tamara Lovett well, this is the woman they know, not the hunched over accused in the defence box being tried for failing to provide the necessaries of life and criminal negligence causing death. Lovett, 47, is alleged by the Crown to have allowed her son to suffer over several days and die of a strep infection and meningitis in November of 2013, because she eschewed traditional medicine in place of such herbal remedies as dandelion tea and oil of oregano.
In a morning of testimony that can best be described as highly dramatic, three men take the stand to champion Lovett, a single mom living in poverty with her seven-year-old boy.
It is in stark contrast to the day’s previous testimony by friend Barbara La Pointe, whose testimony was also dramatic, but that painted a much different picture of their daily reality.
On Wednesday, La Pointe, often through tears, described Ryan as a “beautiful endurer of abuse,” who lived in “the darkest realms of poverty.”
The woman who met the mom at a coffee shop near her apartment took the pair under her wing, partly because she feared so much for the boy. Ryan, she told the court, “was uncared for to the extent that is unimaginable for the average person to understand.”
To those who lived in the same apartment building, though, their memories are markedly different. Neighbour Frank Keller is effusive in his description of Lovett as a woman abandoned by her family in particular and society at large. “She lived in an almost state of shock,” he says, unable to find steady work while raising her son without supports. After he let her work his cash register at trade shows, Keller found Lovett to be honest and reliable.
Another neighbour, Harold Pendergast, offers a similar perspective.
Calling Lovett “a dear friend and trusted comrade,” he shares through tears his memories of Ryan, a boy describes as one “always ahead of the band,” who not long before his death performed a comedy skit “an adult would find funny.”
Along with Robert Dodds, a gallery director who befriended Lovett over their shared love of art, all of the men saw Ryan not long before his mother called 911 and paramedics arrived to find his lifeless body in the early hours of March 2, 2013.
While they also testify to seeing a sick boy, no alarm bells rang — unlike La Pointe from the day previous, who calls Ryan’s state the day before he died one of “supreme suffering.”
Keller says while Lovett told him her son was sick, Ryan “looked more angry and depressed” and at one point thought the child was faking for attention; Pendergast says, “I did not see sunken eyes and a child on the edge of death.”
Dodds, who came by the apartment on March 1, 2013 to check in on the pair, says Ryan appeared under the weather, but “he was still behaving like himself.”
In his cross-examination, defence lawyer Alain Hepner takes the opportunity to have the men reiterate their own ignorance of a deadly sick child and of the boy’s otherwise robustly good health and protective mother.
He also jumps on, not surprisingly, testimony by the men that reveals Lovett had taken antibiotics for a spider bite and had let someone give Ryan antibiotics for a gum ailment, despite her dislike of traditional medicine.
For Justice Kristine Eidsvik, squaring up the image of a woman described as a devoted, self-sacrificing and loving mother, with the medical expert’s description of a child in excruciating pain, dying over a period of days as a bacterial infection ravaged his entire body, is just one of many challenges in a case that can best be described as utterly tragic.