ELDEST OF THREE TESTIFIES ON ALLEGED ABUSE AT HANDS OF ADOPTIVE PARENTS
The video shows the male police officer and his 13-year-old interview subject, sitting across from one another in a windowless room. He inquires about some scars on her arm. “That was from the car accident,” the child tells him matter-of-factly.
On Wednesday morning, the same girl, now a 19-year-old woman, once again sits in a windowless meeting room in the Calgary Courts Centre, watching that 2011 interview. In a courtroom in the same building, sit the people who once were her guardians, also watching the video.
All these video screens and windowless rooms might create an air of unreality, at least for those unaware of the facts behind a most disturbing criminal trial underway in Calgary.
On Day 3 of what’s expected to be a two-week trial, reality is simply unavoidable. Its uglier aspects are present and past, stretching back to a time when the woman and her two siblings were young children.
The names of the two accused cannot be made public, to protect the identities of the three alleged victims, two of them still under the age of 18.
A decade ago, those kids were living a happy life in the United States, being raised by their parents who by all accounts enveloped them with love and security. That was until one horrible day when the two adults were killed in a fiery crash.
The three children, travelling with their parents, survived. Three years later, they were sent to Calgary, adopted by an aunt and uncle.
The Crown contends that after losing their parents, the children then lost their childhood innocence at the hands of two people whose abuse crossed the line into torture. In early 2011, the children were apprehended by social services, after the middle child showed up at school with a bruised and swollen face.
The pair is charged with assault with a weapon, along with other abuse-related offences.
On Wednesday, the young woman sits in that windowless room, following along with the proceedings as she pets a victim services dog. Often, she pulls a tissue out of a box on the table to wipe away tears.
What she describes in a series of videos, along with her testimony on this day, is nothing short of horrifying.
Getting poked with a barbecue fork; having her tongue burned with a butane lighter; repeated punches to the stomach; blows to the face to cause a black eye; being dragged by her hair and being deprived of food for days.
In another video three years later, as she describes how her aunt forced her to ingest her own vomit, the young girl in the video begins to cry. “When I threw up, she told me I had to drink it … how could she have done this to us?”
“You’re a brave girl,” the detective tells her. “I know it must not be easy.”
Later in the day, the defence gets its opportunity to crossexamine this first of three siblings to testify. The defence maintains the eldest girl fabricated the allegations, helped along by her younger siblings; Justice Sandy Park will hear testimony from the children and their teachers before deciding whether to admit it in trial.
Defence lawyer Kelsey Sitar, ever so delicately, hammers away at the young woman’s credibility.
She asks her about problems she was having at school with being late and not handing in assignments; she points to the then-13-year-old’s issue with lying and her declaration of heartfelt love for those adoptive parents, both of which she detailed in a school report written months before the children were taken from the home.
Sitar points to the most egregious of the abuse allegations coming out in a 2014 police interview, noting the young woman hadn’t mentioned them back in 2011.
The defence’s version of reality is, as so often in criminal trials, a markedly different one from the Crown. Sadly, it’s still a nightmarish one.