Mom fought diagnosis of child: doctor

It is always the most wrenching detail, the most devastating, how the battered, maltreated and neglected kids love their parents, no matter what.

So it was Tuesday at the first-degree murder trial of Emil and Rodica Radita, respectively the father and mother of Alexandru, the 15-year-old son they are accused of killing.

The parents are pleading not guilty, with the decision to be made by Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Karen Horner.

But what isn’t much up for grabs by the evidence here is that Alexandru had a dreadful life in their care.

Weighing 37 pounds, wasted to ulcerated skin and bone, the teenager died May 7, 2013, from a bacterial infection that raged in his starved and weakened body. He had been diagnosed as a Type 1 diabetic as a toddler, a diagnosis his parents denied and which treatment they resisted, even after he was hospitalized several times, once, in 2003, so gravely ill he nearly died.

By the pictures this judge has seen, Alexandru had one bright, brilliant year, this when B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD) took him into care, placed him in a foster home where he thrived and grew plump and gorgeous, and fought for a permanent order that would have allowed the boy to be adopted.

But in January of 2005, B.C. Provincial Court Judge Gary Cohen decided instead that Alexandru should be returned to his parents under a six-month supervision order.

Fast forward to January of 2009. The family failed to show up for two consecutive appointments the boy had at B.C. Children’s Hospital, and at the second missed checkup, Dr. Daniel Metzger, one of Alexandru’s most vigorous advocates and the man who had first called in child welfare years earlier because of the parents’ resistance to the diagnosis and treatment, had the hospital social worker alert MCFD.

An agency intake worker made a few calls, but despite being given a forwarding address for the family in Calgary, failed to make any efforts to track the family down there.

In Alberta, Alexandru remained virtually invisible — he never attended school nor saw a doctor — and was in his parents’ thrall.

Shortly before his death, in pictures taken at his 15th birthday party, he was skeletal, with a deep ulcer visible on his nose.

A doctor who reviewed those pictures and ones taken at autopsy noted the boy’s bedroom was dirty, that he was in diapers and obviously incontinent, and that his misery was evident on his painfully gaunt face. That was Alexandru’s life. Another of the physicians who saw him and knew the parents, Dr. Robert White, testified Tuesday.

A pediatrician with expertise in intensive care medicine, he saw the family in Surrey, B.C., where the Raditas then lived.

He first met them in December of 2000, when Alexandru was taken to Surrey Memorial Hospital emergency, seriously ill, with severe abdominal pain and barely conscious. He was almost immediately diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes — its symptoms are so evident it’s hardly rocket science — and almost as quickly, his mother was pushing back against the diagnosis.

Dr. White remembered how, when Alexandru, on a stretcher, was about to be transferred to Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, Mrs. Radita came marching back to emerg to speak to the doctors.

“She was going to prove me, prove the doctors, wrong,” White said. “Prove us wrong. She was still not willing to accept he had this condition … She and God were going to prove us wrong.”

He didn’t of course now remember, so many years later, her exact words, White said, but his memory was nonetheless vivid: “It seemed to me she was more concerned about challenging the diagnosis. Most parents are more concerned with how ill the child is.”

He had some conversations with Metzger, at Children’s Hospital, knew he’d called in child welfare, and that a later hospitalization there led to concerns that “mother was falsifying the readings,” the blood-sugar readings so critical to diabetes management.

From April to September of 2001, White saw Alexandru, always accompanied by one or another parent, at his clinic in Surrey, and almost always White had concerns: The boy was grey and clammy, or not terribly well, and invariably, the parents were objecting to having to also attend a diabetes clinic.

White was accustomed to seeing his young patients only for a short time and didn’t realize the boy and his parents had stopped showing up.

On Oct. 16, 2003, he was the pediatrician on call when Alexandru was brought, near death, to Surrey Memorial early in the morning.

White was so taken aback at the sight of him, at how ruined he was, that he was overcome.

“I had not even realized they hadn’t come (to his clinic) for a while,” he said. “It didn’t really set off alarm bells as it should have. That was part of the reason I was so emotional.”

He chose not to engage with the mother, afraid, probably, he’d say something harsh, and besides, as he put it, “We needed to save his life.”

They resuscitated Alexandru, and as he recovered consciousness, White said, “he spoke and called out for his mum.”

Of course he did: Kids love, no matter what.