Fatality inquiry begins in death of boy killed by parents' intentional neglect
A fatality inquiry is examining how state intervention could help prevent deaths like that of a Calgary teenager killed by his parents through intentional neglect.
Alexandru Radita died in 2013 at age 15, weighing only 37 pounds. He died in his bed in his family's Calgary home of a bacterial infection caused by complications from starvation and untreated diabetes.
His parents, Emil and Rodica Radita, are serving life sentences after being convicted of first-degree murder for withholding medical aid in 2017.
The high-profile case raised concerns about the role of governments and social services in protecting vulnerable youth, and the gaps in the social safety net which may have led to Alex's death.
The province ordered a fatality inquiry into the death to examine the circumstances of Alex's murder.
Provincial court Judge Sharon Van de Veen said she would not be reviewing the “facts relating to the horror of this child's life.” Instead, she said the inquiry's purpose is to determine how the state could have intervened to save Alex's life, and to make recommendations aimed at preventing similar deaths in the future.
“There were government officials involved throughout this child's life, including Child and Family Services in the province of British Columbia and doctors and pharmacists,” Van de Veen said.
The four-day inquiry began Monday and is scheduled to continue through this week. It will only involve witnesses from Alberta, despite the fact there were protector orders in place in B.C.
It will examine three key issues identified in pre-inquiry hearings. Those involve protocols between children's civil service ministries across provinces, protocols for alerts related to children's attendance in home-schooling or online schooling, and pharmacist intervention when insulin medication is accessed sporadically.
Alex was placed under the care of British Columbia Children's Services at age five after his parents failed to treat his diabetes, but was returned to them a year later. The boy and his family fell off the radar in 2009, after the family moved out of B.C. and no Alberta authorities were alerted to his file.
Alex was registered at the School of Hope, a distance learning program in Vermillion, Alta., in 2009 as a Grade 5 student. He never submitted work, and no one from the school ever saw him; he was withdrawn from the school at the end of the academic year.
Current School of Hope vice-principal Michel Despins, who did not work at the school at the time, testified the school did attempt to reach the Radita parents by phone and succeeded multiple times, and sent a letter to the family.
He said the school now has a “pyramid of intervention” for students who miss work, starting with a phone call home to parents and eventually escalating to referral to Alberta Education.
That referral has happened three or four times in Despins's four-and-a-half years with the school, to “mixed success.” He said there's no flagging system to alert if a student withdraws from the school and doesn't enrol elsewhere.
The fatality inquiry centres on the Radita death, but also includes two other cases involving parents with criminal convictions for failing to provide their children with the necessities of life.
Emil Radita, Alex's father, attended the Monday inquiry remotely from the Mission Institution, a medium-security federal prison in B.C.