THE SEARCH FOR THE TRUTH IN THE SHORT AND MISERABLE LIFE OF ALEXANDRU RADITA MAY REST ON MEDICAL CASE FILES FROM B.C.

In court, it’s referred to as “the B.C. evidence,” volumes of medical and child-welfare records and testimony that document the first part of Alexandru Radita’s short and entirely miserable life.

And without it, prosecutor Susan Pepper told Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge Karen Horner Wednesday, she will have only half the story.

Horner, who is presiding over the first-degree murder trial of Alexandru’s parents, Emil, 59, and Rodica Radita, 53, has been hearing the B.C. evidence for the past several days in what’s called a voir dire.

But in one of those magic tricks unique to judge-alone trials, should Horner decide the evidence is too prejudicial and thus inadmissible, she’s presumed to be able, unlike a jury, to disabuse her mind of what she’s heard.

Alexandru’s father and mother are pleading not guilty in the boy’s May 7, 2013 death from a bacterial infection secondary to starvation and his improperly treated Type 1 diabetes.

Though Alexandru was 15, he weighed only 37 pounds, two more than when he was a little boy. His wasted frame was covered with ulcers, some deep to the bone, and he was wearing a diaper.

Pepper told the judge that the parents knew full well what the consequences of improper diabetes management were, because they had seen it twice before, particularly in 2003, when they brought Alexandru to a Surrey, B.C., hospital, in such a state that doctors said he was just hours from death.

“(The parents) knew every day as they watched Alex deteriorate, because they had seen it before,” the prosecutor told the judge. The Raditas knew they had to follow doctors’ instructions and monitor Alex’s insulin and food intake carefully, she said. They knew that if they didn’t, child-welfare officials would remove him from the home.

B.C.’s Ministry of Child and Family Development (MCFD) had done just that after he nearly died in 2003, placing Alexandru in a foster home for about a year, where he thrived, put on weight and turned out to be a lovely boy.

“(The parents) knew the medical consequences of lack of proper insulin management were lethal,” Pepper said.

A handful of B.C. doctors, social workers and an RCMP officer who had charged the parents back then with “failing to provide the necessaries of life” for Alexandru all testified here on the voir dire.

The essence of their collective evidence was that the parents, particularly the mother, were always resistant to the diabetes diagnosis and suspicious of doctors.

But nonetheless, they grudgingly learned the basics of proper diabetes care when the boy was first diagnosed as a toddler in order to be able to take him home.

They showed the doctors they were capable of doing the finger pricks, injecting the insulin and monitoring his food appropriately.

But whenever the parents weren’t carefully monitored — watched like a hawk, in fact — Alexandru would begin to fail.

Once, in early 2001, shortly after his diagnosis, a doctor at B.C.’s Children’s Hospital began to suspect his mother was somehow fiddling with the blood sugar readings she was required to report: They were too normal, too quickly, and Alex’s condition, particularly that he wasn’t gaining weight or was losing more, was at odds with the reported readings.

This, as Pepper said, “was the first in what would prove to be a series of factual manipulations of the readings” that other doctors also saw.

One of the physicians alerted MCFD. Alexandru was hospitalized again until the parents could receive more instruction about how to manage diabetes.

But the family fell off the medical radar — he saw no doctors for two years — until the parents brought the boy to emergency in October of 2003, when he was in the final stages of malnutrition.

This time, MCFD apprehended Alexandru, placed him in the foster home and sought a permanent order, which would have meant the boy could have been adopted.

But it was denied by B.C. Provincial Court Judge Gary Cohen, who found that though Alexandru was indeed a “child in need of protection,” it was in his best interests to return him to his parents under a six-month supervision order.

Once that order expired, it appears there was little monitoring of the boy.

In 2009, B.C. doctors reported he had missed the past two appointments at the diabetes clinic, MCFD made minimal efforts to find the family and didn’t follow up a forwarding address in Calgary for one of Alexandru’s seven siblings.

Alexandru was off the radar again, and there he remained — isolated, not in school, in the bosom of his family — until his death in 2013.

Without considering the B.C. background, prosecutor Pepper told the judge, she will be working in the dark.

“Alex did not arrive in Alberta as some sort of blank slate,” she said, “but with a dramatic history, complete with near-death experiences.”

She said the parents, having learned from the 2003 close call that they had to keep Alexandru “away from society” in order to give him insulin as they, and not the doctors, saw fit, “fostered his complete dependence on them.”

“A trial needs to be fair to the accused,” Pepper added, “but is in the end a search for truth. And the truth is not half a life.”

Thursday, lawyers for the parents will make their arguments against the admission of the B.C. evidence.