Witness ‘bugged’ by seeing Jeffrey wither
Inquest hears from those living in house at the time
As it turns out, it also takes if not quite a village, at least a household, to kill a child.
Michael Reitemeier and Tammy Kidman lived in this particular semi-detached house in east-end Toronto in 2002.
They were among the non-criminally charged adults — there were four of them — who watched Jeffrey Baldwin’s cruel and unusual punishment, which is to say his life and death, and did absolutely nothing about it.
The little boy’s maternal grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, were convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement in the locking up of Jeffrey and his sister. They are serving life in prison.
But either Reitemeier or Kidman could have been the saviour of that little boy who was starved to death over years, beaten, humiliated, locked up and left to drink from the toilet and who ultimately succumbed to pneumonia and septic shock sometime in the early hours of Nov. 30, 2002.
As Reitemeier put it Tuesday in his testimony at the Ontario coroner’s inquest now examining Jeffrey’s death, as a parent of two himself, “It bugged me” to see the little boy wasting away, “but at that point Tammy and my kids had no place to go. I was trying not to create friction (in the household).”
Or, as Kidman said once, in her strange, smiley way, she surely noticed Jeffrey was growing skinnier and skinnier, “But I didn’t pay that much attention, to be honest.”
The lawyer who was then questioning her, Freya Kristjanson, who represents Jeffrey’s three siblings who survived the house, unconsciously recoiled, as though she’d been slapped.
“He was wasting away before your eyes?” “Yes,” said Kidman. “You didn’t think of giving him some of your food, or maybe making him something?” Kristjanson asked. “Correct,” said Kidman. In another exchange, coroner’s counsel Jill Witkin was equally taken aback.
Behind Kidman on a screen was the terrible picture of Jeffrey on the autopsy table, all skin and bones and stick limbs.
Witkin asked Kidman to take a look, and she turned in her chair and did so.
“You were a mother of two,” Witkin said. “Are you telling us you believed that child had been taken to the doctor?”
“Yes,” Kidman said, still smiley.
Witkin reminded her she’d had some early childhood education training at that point, had worked in a daycare.
“That body there, with no muscle mass whatsoever, you believed nothing needed to be done for him?” she asked, incredulous.
“At the time,” said Kidman, with real equanimity, “No.”
Reitemeier and Kidman are respectively 42 and 38 years old now. They were 31 and 27 years back then, when they presided over Jeffrey’s dying. They weren’t naifs who had just fallen off the turnip truck.
They were parents of two themselves. Their oldest was five, the exact age of Jeffrey. They knew very well what a child that age should look like, act like, smell like: They had one.
They weren’t uneducated. Reitemeier finished high school and with a bit more effort, he said, could have made the honour roll; Kidman graduated too and even had that term of early childhood education at Seneca College under her belt before she got pregnant and quit. But they clung to their stories.
Reitemeier’s is that he was looking after his kids, his family. He had just moved into the death house to join the others after a stint of couchsurfing with friends.
“I didn’t really want that for my kids and Tammy,” he said, virtuously — yes, how much better for his two to watch as their cousin and his sister were starved, the one unto death, the other very nearly.
As for the two children he loved so much, well, he never saw them again after the Catholic Children’s Aid Society scooped them up in the wake of Jeffrey’s death. He didn’t even try to see them. Oh well.
He should have done something, he said, but after all, he was afraid of Elva, the grandmother who had legal custody of Jeffrey and his siblings.
She was then a tiny woman of ferocious will and cunning, but Reitemeier could have overpowered her physically with a hand tied behind his back and Jeffrey in the other.
Unforgivably, he attempted to paint the little boy and him as soul brothers.
“He was scared and I was scared,” is how he put it. Jeffrey was five years old and 21 pounds; Reitemeier was 31 years old and at least 180: It must have been impossible to tell them apart.
He was shameless about this effort.
Toward the end of Jeffrey’s life, Reitemeier said, he tried to talk to him, but “it was one of the days he didn’t want to talk. I get like that too,” he said, rolling his big empty head side to side, as if to say, “You see? We were the same.”
The only real clue as to why he did nothing to help that child came, as it does always with the morally vacant, when he spoke of his own father, a purported abusive drunk, and the mother who allegedly failed to protect him.
“I figure,” he said, “the way I grew up, you know, and the stuff I went through, and people would have known about me, and I was never protected.”
Jeffrey could fend for himself, in other words — as he had.
As for Kidman, a decade of therapy and she has seen the light: Now, she knows Bottineau and Kidman were bad, “just plain crazy”; now she knows Jeffrey was starving; now, she wishes she’d done something, “anything … at any point.”
But, back then, she believed Bottineau and Kidman; she trusted them.
She wept briefly then, for herself, but was soon smiling again.
Kristjanson asked, very carefully, what could be done by way of inquest recommendations to change “six adults who did nothing to save Jeffrey, people like you, who have a chance to save a child?”
“Nothing would have made a difference to me,” Kidman said, “because I believed she (Bottineau) was doing what was necessary.”
National Post photographer Tyler Anderson was outside the court when Kidman testified. Reitemeier listened to some of it, then went outside. He fell into a deep sleep, Anderson said, so deep he almost fell off his chair.
It was the sleep of the conscienceless.
Later, as Anderson chased the two outside the Ontario government building where the inquest is being held, Reitemeier warned him he was going to call the police.
A Canadian Press colleague I adore remarked, “You didn’t call 911 for Jeffrey.”
Reitemeier gave her the finger.