THE TRAGIC DEATH OF ALEXANDRU RADITA, 15 — STARVED, EMACIATED AND COVERED IN SORES — IS ANOTHER CASE OF CHILD WELFARE AUTHORITIES FAILING TO LEARN THE LESSONS OF THE PAST AND THE PRESENT.
Protection doesn’t cross provincial lines
Five years before Alexandru Radita starved to death and died from untreated diabetes — his teeth rotting and body covered in ulcers, one in his neck so deep it would have required surgery — in his parents’ Calgary home, child welfare officials in Canada got a stark reminder of how easily vulnerable children drop off the radar if their families move provinces.
But the lesson went unlearned, as in child welfare, it so often does.
Alexandru’s parents, Rodica, 53, and Emil Radita, 59, are being tried for firstdegree murder in a judgealone trial.
The boy was 15 when he died on May 7, 2013. He weighed only 37 pounds, two more than he had as a toddler when, in an eerie preview of how he died, he was brought to a Surrey, B.C., hospital so gravely ill staff felt he wasn’t safe in his parents’ care.
He had been diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes in 2000, at the age of two.
But his parents, Romanian immigrants, were suspicious of the diagnosis, unwilling to accept it, and reluctant to give him insulin and follow through with blood glucose testing.
It was in October of 2003 that Alexandru was deemed in need of protection by a social worker with the province’s Ministry of Children and Family Services. He was removed from the family for more than a year.
But though the worker sought what’s called a “continuing custody order,” which would have terminated his parents’ rights and allowed Alexandru to be adopted, in January 2005, B.C. Provincial Court Judge Gary Cohen instead ordered the boy returned to the family under a supervision order.
(In his 10-page decision, Cohen even criticized the social worker for depriving the boy “of access to his Romanian heritage, language and tradition” during the period the parents were allowed only supervised visits. That worker at least kept Alexandru alive, albeit arguably at the expense of his heritage, which is more than could be said of others.)
At some point thereafter, the family moved across the border to Alberta, B.C. officials didn’t alert their provincial counterparts about the family’s troubled past, and Alexandru effectively vanished from view, there to quietly die.
If the boy’s 2003 hospitalization offered a foreshadowing of his fate, the story of a little aboriginal girl who nearly died when British Columbia and Saskatchewan officials made a shocking muddle of her case offered a broader glimpse of what can happen to children whose families flee child welfare or are “transferred” to dubious caregivers in other provinces.
The little girl, unnamed to protect her privacy, was 3½ when, in July 2008, she was removed from her grandfather’s home in a small Saskatchewan First Nations community after concerned citizens called police.
Confined to a dark furnace room in the basement of the house, she was grossly emaciated and suffering from malnutrition, as well as other injuries, including an untreated fractured clavicle, bruising and scars on her head.
The mishandling of her case was the subject of a scathing 2013 report from Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth, an independent agency that reports to the B.C. legislature.
The grandfather and his spouse were later convicted of failing to provide the necessaries of life and in 2012 were each sentenced to three years in prison.
But, Turpel-Lafond found, the child could have been spared 18 months of abuse and neglect if either B.C.’s Ministry of Children and Family Development or the First Nations Child and Family Service agency had “exhibited basic due diligence” and done their jobs.
In B.C., the child was removed from her mother’s care and placed in a foster home. Then, the agency sought a long-term placement for her and contacted extended family in Saskatchewan. The First Nations’ agency offered the grandfather as a recommended provider, despite his significant history of criminal convictions and chronic addictions and the fact he had been unable to parent his own daughter.
The required basics — a criminal records check and a home study of the grandfather’s place — were dated, incomplete or grossly inaccurate.
In fact, so sloppy was the First Nations agency’s level of competence, Turpel-Lafond said, that she had “great concern” about whether B.C. child welfare “can safely rely” on its work any more.
The grandfather was awarded custody of the little girl on Jan. 31, 2007.
By the time she was rescued, her stomach was distended, her ribs visible, eyes swollen as a result of malnutrition. She had lost weight during the year and a half she lived with her grandfather, a time when she should have gained almost 10 pounds.
The little girl is still living in Saskatchewan, in a different First Nations’ foster home. Turpel-Lafond has recommended to Saskatchewan that she be given an independent lawyer to consider whether she might sue civilly the governments and agencies that so abjectly failed her.
Turpel-Lafond watched the Volkswagen emissions crisis unfold last fall from her perch as a government watchdog.
You will recall it: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency discovered VW had a “defeat device” that would foil emissions testing on diesel engines. No one died or was hurt, but such was the customer service ethos that the top VW executive quit, millions of cars were recalled, company shares fell. All in all, it was an exercise in enormous accountability.
In her decade watching over British Columbia’s most vulnerable kids — and she estimates there are 500 year whose families or files move back and forth among Alberta, Saskatchewan and B.C. — she said, “I can’t think of a single person who has lost a job.”
THE LESSON WENT UNLEARNED, AS IN CHILD WELFARE, IT SO OFTEN DOES. National Post cblatchford@postmedia.com