Agency did not fear for child’s safety: aid worker
No ‘protection concerns’ about grandparents
It seems akin to never opening the fridge unless you already know what’s in it, or never reading a book unless you know the ending, but never mind.
That, in essence, is Margarita Quintana’s explanation for never having run record checks on Jeffrey Baldwin’s grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman.
In other words, she didn’t know what she didn’t know and she made damned sure it stayed that way.
Quintana was the key social worker on Jeffrey’s case for the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.
Now retired, she began testifying Wednesday at the Ontario coroner’s inquest examining the little boy’s death on Nov. 30, 2002.
It is the first time in the almost 11 years since that her handling of the case — and the agency’s — has been examined in a public forum.
As with other agency witnesses who also testified about a case more than a decade later, Quintana’s memory has eroded. She has little independent recollection, she said, and is relying almost totally on documents and notes she wrote.
She is being taken through her evidence-in-chief by Jordan Goldblatt, lawyer for the Canadian Union of Public Employees’ local that represents agency workers.
Early on, he asked her point-blank if she had ever done internal records checks on the grandparents, who are now serving life sentences for second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death.
After she answered in the negative three times, Goldblatt asked why she hadn’t done it.
“Because we didn’t have protection concerns regarding them (the grandparents),” she said, adding, bewilderingly, “We always check records when we have protection concerns.”
The expression, “protection concerns,” is a blanket one used to describe situations where the agency has reason to fear for a child’s safety or well-being.
The records-check failure is the issue at the very heart of the inquest.
Because Quintana, her supervisors and others failed to check for old files under Bottineau’s and Kidman’s names, they missed finding a half-century of information about them.
The agency had been involved with Bottineau’s parents since 1950.
Bottineau herself was convicted in the 1969 death of her first baby, and Kidman had assault convictions for beating up two of her other children by another man. A psychological assessment of Bottineau found her of marginal intelligence but considerable cunning. Because of its protection concerns, the agency had kept a supervision order on the couple’s three daughters — including Jeffrey’s mother, Yvonne — until 1981.
Yet from 1994 until Jeffrey’s death, a period when the agency opened and shut various files as Yvonne and her boyfriend, Richard Baldwin, kept popping out children, the agency’s view of the grandparents, particularly Bottineau, underwent a staggering metamorphosis.
Now, Bottineau was not a sophisticated person nor a great actor.
She was clearly a character from the margins of society. She decorated a wall of her house in framed online certificates readily identifiable as dubious.
And when, for instance, Jeffrey died and the ambulance came for him, Bottineau wasn’t smart enough even to feign distress, and none of the members of that dim household thought to ride to hospital with the boy they all pretended had been cared for and loved.
Yet while Quintana’s main supervisor, Marina Sweet, recognized Bottineau wasn’t “a university-graduate mother or anything,” she also said, on the basis of having met her at several case conferences, that she was “a very caring grandmother and mother.”
And Quintana herself was quickly onside with Bottineau.
“Yes,” she told Goldblatt once, “she was very positive. She was so
“I have observed these children blooming and being happy in their care.”
AID WORKER MARGARITA QUINTANA
helpful, yes. She was always there when needed.”
Her notes and reports frequently spoke of Bottineau and Kidman as “the strength” of this young family, and in a slender “home study” she did in 1998 (at the request of another child-welfare agency, not the CCAS), Quintana outright recommended that another baby be placed with the grandparents.
“I have observed these children blooming and being happy in their care,” she told the York Children’s Aid Society.
By the summer of that year, 1998, Bottineau and Kidman had won custody of all four of the children of Yvonne and Richard.
The kids had been “transferred” to Bottineau’s care at family court, but the moves were either supported or facilitated by the CCAS and Quintana.
There’s little question the youngsters’ own parents were troubled. Yvonne and Richard had a volatile relationship, the state of which appeared to interest them more than their kids.
They fought and argued; made promises to the agency they rarely kept; they were inept and narcissistic
hey were, in short, the logical products of genetics and environment. Probably, they were bad parents. Probably, the CCAS and Quintana were right to realize the children shouldn’t remain with them.
The agency devoted a litany of resources to trying to remake them, following the legislative mantra of child welfare in the province at the time — that agencies should take “the least intrusive” action and do all they could to maintain family integrity.
But the skepticism through which the agency and Quintana viewed the young parents disappeared utterly when it came to Bottineau and Kidman.
They were treated as though touched by some magical grandparent dust: They seemed concerned for the youngsters; they seemed kindly, so why check them out?
It is so jarring and galling to hear Quintana, and those who went to the witness box before her, speak of Bottineau and Kidman as “supportive” and “concerned about the wellbeing” of those children.
The grandparents about whom there were no protection concerns kept Jeffrey and a sister in a locked bedroom cell, devoid of bathroom facilities; they fed them, once in a while, scraps on a “pig mat” in the kitchen; they demeaned and abused them. Jeffrey died as a skeletal ruin. The underlying cause of death was prolonged starvation, the immediate one pneumonia and septic shock. The sister who had been locked up with him survived, but barely.
At the age of 5, Jeffrey weighed 21 pounds, less than he had as a oneyear-old.