Social worker says teen’s death was accident, not suicide
The case worker for a troubled Calgary teen doesn’t believe the girl was attempting suicide when she was run over while lying on a busy roadway, a fatality inquiry heard Tuesday.
Donna Graham testified that although Tyla Chipaway had expressed suicidal thoughts in the past and was prone to depression, she thinks the teen simply passed out on the street.
Graham said she assumes Chipaway was seeking help for her uncle, who had fallen out of his motorized wheelchair, and had stepped onto 16th Avenue N.E. to flag down someone.
“Do I think she did it on purpose? No,” Graham told inquiry lawyer Christine Nugent.
“I think the person she was with had fallen out of a wheelchair,” Graham said.
“When it goes over, there’s no easy way of getting him back in,” she said.
“So she would’ve been looking for somebody to help.”
Chipaway, 16, was killed instantly when cab driver Stanislaw Maguder failed to see her lying across the middle lane of the busy thoroughfare early March 18, 2015.
Maguder fled the scene and was later handed an eight-month sentence for hit and run.
Graham said Chipaway, who had an alcohol problem, had bounced around various family residences for several years.
She said the girl’s paternal aunt in Hinton was her legal guardian, although child services was in the process of making Chipaway its permanent ward.
Graham said a permanent guardianship application scheduled for just two days before Chipaway’s death had to be adjourned because the aunt didn’t like comments the department made about the girl’s father, who died in 2011.
She told the inquiry that courtordered guardianship would give child services parental authority over the teen, which would have allowed them to get her into assistance programs.
Chipaway was placed in the teen shelter Avenue 15 in November 2014, after the Calgary aunt she had been living with died.
Shortly before the teen’s death, she was moved to Wood’s Homes Exit youth shelter, but was happy about the change because it allowed her to be just blocks from where her mother was living at the Fanning Centre.
“She was quite happy with it because it was within walking distance of mom,” she said.
The inquiry, meant to determine how similar deaths can be prevented in the future, resumes Wednesday.