Lawyers treat father of dead girl with kid gloves
WINNIPEG – It isn’t surprising that Steve Sinclair should be, as an old saying I’d not heard until recently has it, “eating from both sides of the can.”
It means to profess one thing and do another, while claiming the credit for both. Here at the inquiry into the death of Phoenix Sinclair, eating from both sides of the can is the provincial pastime.
Sinclair is the father of Phoenix, the little aboriginal girl who died at the age of five at the hands of her mother, Samantha Kematch, and her then-lover Karl McKay.
The two were convicted in 2008 of first-degree murder in Phoenix’s death, a death that is estimated to have occurred in June of 2005 but which wasn’t discovered for about 10 months because, after killing her, the couple buried the little girl’s body at the dump on the Fisher Lake First Nation, a reserve about 200 kilometres north of Winnipeg.
Now 32, Sinclair testified Wednesday at the inquiry, questioned by commission counsel Sherri Walsh.
His testimony boils down to this: He loved his little girl and raised her, if by raising one means regularly handing her off to friends who were willing caregivers, and he was concerned about Kematch’s way with Phoenix — even that she might be abusive — if by concerned one means fretting, but actually doing bugger all about it.
In April of 2004, Phoenix was living with friends of Sinclair, Kim Edwards and her then-boyfriend Rohan Stephenson, as the little girl very often was.
Kematch showed up, wanting to take her out. Stephenson called Sinclair to say the mother wanted to take her for the afternoon, and was it OK?
Just about everyone was at least aware of and unnerved by Kematch’s attitude toward her daughter; the young mother was at best indifferent to her, at worst potentially dangerous. She’d already had one baby taken into permanent care, and her second child with Sinclair, Echo, had died of a respiratory infection as an infant, when Phoenix was just-turned-one, in July of 2001.
Sinclair told Stephenson it was fine for Phoenix to go with Kematch.
Some time before that spring day in 2004, then, is when Sinclair last saw his daughter; it’s unclear when precisely it was.
“I waited a couple of days,” he said, before checking with Edwards and Stephenson, figuring, as he put it, “OK, she’s with her mum, she must be fine; she’s with her mother.”
But the mother didn’t bring Phoenix back.
Sinclair waited a couple of more days, then he and Edwards “made a couple of calls.”
This turns out to have been a call to Winnipeg Child and Family Services, the child-welfare agency that ostensibly had watched over the little girl much of her life.
At first, when Sinclair described this call, it appeared as though he had been phoning to demand action.
But in brief cross-examination by the Winnipeg CFS lawyer, Gordon McKinnon, Sinclair clarified that he hadn’t suggested Phoenix might be in danger, but rather that he was inquiring as to her whereabouts.
As McKinnon put it, Sinclair “wanted an address.”
“I had an assumption she had turned her life around,” Sinclair told the lawyer. “If not totally, maybe a part of it.” As he testified earlier, “… she was with her mother, her mother should know better and not hurt her.”
“Did you do anything else?” McKinnon asked.
“No, I went around, I ran it over in my mind — she’s with her mum, why not have her mother parent her?” Sinclair said.
He speaks like this, oddly passive, filled with the jargon of child-welfare, as one might expect of someone who was himself a permanent ward of the state.
Months later, in the fall of 2004, Sinclair heard from Stephenson that there had been a “sighting” of Phoenix with Kematch in a part of Winnipeg.
“I walked by there a few times,” he told McKinnon. “I didn’t go in the building. She should be fine.”
Sinclair got on with his life. That December, with a new girlfriend, he moved for about nine months to the Sandy Lake First Nation in Ontario, and stayed there until the following summer.
And there you have it: From sometime in the spring of 2004, when he last saw his daughter, his efforts to find out where and how she was consisted of the following — one phone call, maybe two, to CFS, and a couple of strolls past a building in Winnipeg where the little girl might have been living with Kematch.
He found out she was “missing” in March of 2006, when the police knocked on his door. At that time, he went looking for her around a couple of Winnipeg schools where he’d heard she might have been. The remains of the little girl were discovered in the reserve dump about a month later, on April 20, 2006.
Now Sinclair had nothing to do with the murder of his daughter, and workers with the CFS were quite right to anoint him the better parent of the two.
Agency notes made all those years ago describe him as bright and articulate, and full of potential; so he remains. And by the low standards of what those workers routinely see, and in particular by comparison with Kematch, Sinclair may well have been father of the year.
But he wasn’t. He didn’t have all that much to do with his daughter’s life, either, no matter how much he and those at the inquiry wish it were otherwise.
CFS records show quite clearly that the pattern of Phoenix’s life was set at birth: She was immediately apprehended over concerns about her parents, spent four months in agency care under a “temporary order,” and was returned to them.
Thereafter, she was shifted among homes — Edwards and Stephenson’s, one of Sinclair’s sister’s places, his apartment and later, after the couple split up in the early summer of 2001, Kematch’s — sometimes with the CFS seal of approval, sometimes, this when the agency would close the file, informally.
She was apprehended once under Sinclair’s care; he was drunk.
Social worker Kim Hansen, who testified here last month, described the scene like this: “There’s gang members in the home and you’ve got a little child of three with gangs and violence and drugs and weapons and no one really seems to be taking care of her.”
Yet Sinclair was treated with great deference at the inquiry. The few lawyers who questioned him prefaced their softballs with murmurs of sorrow about his loss. McKinnon even offered that his drinking problem was not that he drank every day.
“Of course not,” Sinclair replied.
“Your problem was that when you drank you drank a little bit too much?”
“Yes,” Sinclair said. No one asked if he still drank. No one asked if he had more children, though Sinclair’s passing complaint that social workers were always urging him to take another parenting class just “like they still do now” invited the question.
Sinclair’s father was not in his life. His mother, who had gone to residential school, was. There were seven youngsters in the family, and when he was about nine, he ended up going into care. He moved among foster homes, became a permanent ward, and ended up with one foster family for six years.
All things considered, Sinclair did well, if by well one means for someone whose only parental role model was “television. I wanted to be like them, right?”