Serenity’s mother wants you to see these photos
She took the photos on Sept. 24, 2014.
But until last week, Serenity’s mother hadn’t actually looked at them.
She took the pictures of her dying four-year-old daughter with her cellphone camera. Later, the phone broke. For two years, she carried that broken phone wherever she moved. She ended up in another province, far from Alberta, where she kept the phone in a drawer.
Last week, she said, she took the phone to a repair place to see if they could retrieve the photographs.
She wasn’t prepared for what she saw.
“It was harder to look at them than it was when I took them. Back then I was still in shock.”
And yet, Serenity’s mother wants to make the photos public now. And she doesn’t want you to look away.
“I had to show people what happened to her. The people who did this to her are still out there. Reports can be hidden away by a government. These pictures can’t.”
The disturbing images show a child, painfully thin, lying in a bed at the Stollery Children’s Hospital. The once-robust preschooler weighed just 8 kg, or almost 18 pounds, the weight of a typical nine-month-old infant.
She arrived at hospital with severe hypothermia, a fractured skull and a “horrific” brain injury. Her body was covered in deep, deep bruises, including in her anal and genital areas. The pictures only show the bruises on her arms and legs, including a contusion on her shin so large and deep it makes you wince.
Active, healthy kids often have bruises. But not like these.
“When I looked at my baby, there in that bed, and saw all the bruises and cuts and lacerations all over her body, when I saw all her missing fingernails, I was sick to my stomach,” said Serenity’s mother.
“But I took the pictures, because I knew I needed them. I knew I would need hard evidence. I knew I would need to show somebody.”
Serenity and her two older half-siblings were taken from their mother’s care, in part because Serenity’s father was physically abusive and in part because their mother had her own problems with alcohol and marijuana. The children were placed in foster care with non-Aboriginal families, where they thrived. Their mother was pleased with their care. She got sober. The foster families where the children lived say she was a loving mother who visited her children regularly and was working hard to get them back.
But child welfare workers decided to remove the children from their foster homes and place them instead with relatives on a nearby reserve. The relatives refused to go through the usual kinship care training.
The worker who did the very cursory home study didn’t bother to do background checks on all the adults living in the home.
Within two months, Child Intervention Services received reports the children were bruised, scratched and malnourished. A doctor found Serenity had already lost three pounds. Yet when their mother complained, she was denied all access to her children. In just a few months, the relatives were granted full legal custody of the children. Their child welfare files were closed. There were no followup visits by social workers.
A year later, Serenity was airlifted to the Stollery, starved and battered. According to allegations in court documents, Serenity’s brother then was 61/2 and weighed just 15 kg, or 33 pounds, far below average for a child his age. Serenity’s sister, 71/2, weighed only 16 kg, or 35 pounds.
Despite medical evidence suggesting all three children may have been abused, no one has ever been charged.
After the Edmonton Journal broke the story of Serenity and the bureaucratic bungles that hindered the investigation of her death, the Notley government created a new ministry of children’s services. It appointed a new minister. It struck an all-party panel to study the province’s child welfare system. But that panel is forbidden, by its terms of reference, to ask any questions about what happened to Serenity and her siblings.
In some ways, in fact, the panel process has hindered the investigation. Alberta has a child welfare Council for Quality Assurance, which is supposed to review problematic files. They’ve never reviewed Serenity’s case — which they only learned about last fall. Now, in light of the allparty panel, they’ve put off any review indefinitely.
The RCMP say they’ve concluded their investigation.
Alberta Justice will only say the file is currently with the Alberta Crown Prosecution Service for review.
Serenity’s mother has read about David and Collet Stephen, the Lethbridge couple found guilty of failing to provide the necessaries of life to their son, Ezekiel, who died of meningitis, after his parents treated him only with “natural” remedies.
If they could be found guilty, she asks, why can’t someone be charged in Serenity’s death — whether it’s for murder or manslaughter or criminal neglect or, at the very least, failing to provide the necessaries of life?
Far from Alberta, about to give birth to a new baby — a son she plans to name Xavier — she’s waiting, waiting for some information, for some kind of justice for the little girl she lost.
“I just don’t want her to be forgotten.”