Ashley’s guard haunted by scene

Leaving her on floor ‘will never go away’

TORONTO — In harrowing testimony, a federal correctional officer has described the “gentle child” the country knows as Ashley Smith and how he and his fellow guards essentially lost their free will to help her.

Gaetan Desrochers, a correctional officer at the Grand Valley Institution for Women where Ashley asphyxiated herself on Oct. 19, 2007, and a trained crisis negotiator, was in the witness stand Wednesday at the coroner’s inquest probing the 19-year-old’s death.

But buried in Desrochers’s poignant evidence, which had jurors, journalists and even lawyers wiping away tears, were a number of bombshells.

He admitted, for instance, that “toward the end” of Ashley’s final stay at the Kitchener, Ont., prison, he made unauthorized entries into her cell alone, to cut off the ligatures she tied constantly around her neck, and didn’t document it.

At the time, guards were under direct, if moronic, orders not to go into her cell “as long as she’s breathing” — the jurors have heard audio recordings of manager Travis McDonald using those precise words on the morning Ashley died — and were being constantly threatened with discipline by their superiors.

So Desrochers began doing it on the sly.

“I did go in after they said don’t go in,” he said. “I couldn’t take it any more. Reports weren’t written.”

This happened more than twice, he told the jurors, explaining that sometimes, “she (Ashley) would ask me — ‘This is too tight, Gaetan, I can’t breathe now.’

“She was just a gentle child you help,” he said. “As soon as you cut it off, she thanks you.”

He painted an affectionate portrait of the teenager who ended up in federal prison after spending years in New Brunswick’s youth justice system, much of it in isolation. After Ashley turned 18, her youth sentence was “converted” to an adult term.

As with the other half-dozen COs who have testified here, Desrochers didn’t believe for a minute that Ashley belonged in prison.

He tearfully described two other events that fall, one where he was ordered from Ashley’s cell by a manager and another where a female guard was begging their supervisor to let the COs enter her cell to help her.

What he was detailing was in effect a bizarre management recipe for how to destroy the morale and confidence of front-line staff at the expense of this young woman, or as Desrochers moaned once, “What have I done to Ashley? And what have they done to me?”

Like police officers, COs in theory have discretion to decide such things as what constitutes an emergency and when to enter an inmate’s cell to preserve life.

But by the time Ashley died, Desrochers said, the guards had lost all that — not in their work with other inmates, just with the Moncton, N.B., native.

He described how COs would be outside Ashley’s cell, begging for the cell to be opened, saying “We need to go in now!” and their superiors refused.

He would find himself asking, “What is happening? How can I be doing this? It’s like brainwashing.”

The incident that haunts him the most occurred on Sept. 20, 2007.

He and another volunteer negotiator were called in from home: Ashley had smashed a TV set and was now in possession of glass shards, with which she was cutting cloth ligatures.

Their job, Desrochers said, was to talk to her, “lower the emotions and raise rationality.”

The jurors have seen the video — in the CSC, any “use of force” must be videoed.

As coroner’s counsel Marg Creal put it to Desrochers, at one point on the video, he left the cell.

“Yes I did leave her,” he replied. “She was on the floor with a ligature on her neck.”

His partner tapped him on the shoulder and told him the “correctional manager wants you to come out.” Desrochers refused. His partner tapped him again. “The correctional manager has given you a direct order to come out right now.”

In a paramilitary organization like the CSC, a direct order means more than it might elsewhere. “I have to listen,” Desrochers remembered.

“Here I am, looking at Ashley, I have the training, I don’t understand why I’m leaving.”

The third tap came then. His partner told him, “Someone (the manager) is really freaking out. It’s a direct order.”

Desrochers left, and it was clear he has not forgiven himself for it.

He decided he had to quit right there and then, he said, weeping.

He wondered what his negotiator trainer would say, “what would my children, my own children, have said to me.”

But his partner talked him into going back to Ashley’s cell, telling him, “You can’t quit tonight; Ashley needs us.”

“Leaving Ashley Smith on the floor,” he said, “will never go away.”