System failed in 3 chances to save boy
Starved boy’s dignity gone, inquest hears
The wheels of Canadian justice grinding as they do, almost 11 years after the little boy named Jeffrey Baldwin was starved to death, the Ontario coroner’s inquest into just how that happened finally began Monday.
Jeffrey died on Nov. 30, 2002, a near-six-year-old who weighed 21 pounds, or about what he had weighed as a one-year-old.
Officially the cause of death was bacterial bronchopneumonia as a side-effect of chronic starvation.
But Jeffrey was also covered in bruises and crusted sores; his belly was distended, his joints swollen, his limbs skeletal. He and his sister were regularly kept in a locked, unheated room, left to lie in their own waste. When they were fed, it was from a bowl on a mat called “the pig corner.”
As paramedic Marc Dugas testified, and he was one of the first on the scene that morning all those years ago, “You see something like this and … it’s just soul-destroying. It was the complete and utter destruction of dignity to any child, or human being, in my opinion.”
First came the criminal trial of the two adults who ran that house, Jeffrey’s maternal grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman.
In 2006, they were convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced respectively to 22 and 20 years in prison.
Next came the appeals of both their convictions and sentences, which were roundly rejected at the Ontario Court of Appeal in 2011.
Then in January last year, the Supreme Court of Canada granted Bottineau leave to appeal, then briskly dismissed the application.
Now the inquest, and though the jurors here are prohibited from assigning blame to any person or organization, there is much of it to go around.
Aside from answering the so-called “five questions” — who died, how, when, where and by what means, all questions that already have been answered — the inquest’s function is to focus community attention on deaths that may be preventable and to make sure, as coroner Dr. Peter Clark said, “that the death of no one of its members is overlooked, concealed or ignored.”
Preventable: Gee, do you think?
While it has long been known that the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto had in its own files evidence that Bottineau and Kidman were convicted child abusers when one by one it shuffled Jeffrey and his three siblings off to them, some details were revealed for the first time Monday.
Jill Witkin, counsel to the coroner and in some regards the inquest equivalent of a prosecutor, told the jurors that, over an eight-year period, the CCAS had no fewer than five distinct opportunities to save Jeffrey and his siblings.
“However, after the grandparents were granted custody of each child by the court, the (CCAS) closed their file and no worker oversaw or checked in on the family.
“Moreover,” she said, in all that time, “no worker performed any background checks on Elva and Norman prior to the transfer of a child — no criminal record checks and no internal checks of past Society files.
“Had proper checks been done, they would have revealed a horrific history of incapable parenting and child abuse … including past criminal convictions.”
Witkin didn’t reveal the specifics but, as the National Post first reported just a few months after Jeffrey’s death, Bottineau was convicted on June 10, 1970, of assault causing bodily harm in the death of her own baby daughter, five-month-old Eva, who died of pneumonia but was discovered at autopsy to have also suffered fractures.
Then just 19, Bottineau was sentenced to a year’s probation.
Kidman was convicted of two counts of assault causing bodily harm on Dec. 29, 1978, in connection with attacks on two of Bottineau’s children, then five and six, from another relationship.
He was sentenced to two years’ probation and fined $150 for each offence.
All of this damning information was in the agency’s own files.
At the inquest, for the first time, the child-welfare workers and supervisors will testify.
At the criminal trial, prosecutors unexpectedly didn’t call any witnesses from the CCAS, which meant the conduct of the agency and its employees went unexamined.
The agency is represented at the inquest by lawyer Brian Gover, while Jordan Goldblatt is acting for the Canadian Union of Public Employees, Local 2190, which represents 315 CCAS child-welfare workers.
In fact, there were two other child-welfare agencies — and a police force — peripherally involved with the case as well.
Shortly after the grandparents got custody of Jeffrey and his sister, Yvonne Kidman gave birth to another little boy, who can be called only Sibling 3. Because Yvonne Kidman and her boyfriend, Richard Baldwin, were then living in York Region, the York Region Children’s Aid Society apprehended the baby within hours.
The York agency requested a home study of the Bottineau-Kidman household — it was done, but as usual in CCAS fashion, without background checks — and also asked the Toronto Police Service for a criminal record check.
“There appears to have been no response to the request and no followup,” Witkin said.
The Toronto Children’s Aid Society received an allegation in August 2000 that Yvonne Kidman had been sexually abused by her father when she was younger.
The Toronto CAS duly notified the CCAS, which reactivated the Bottineau-Kidman file. Again, no criminal record check was done on Norman Kidman, and the agency checked for records under the name of Elva Kidman, not Elva Bottineau, and so found nothing.
Workers went to the home and “the children were assessed together and found to be healthy and safe,” Witkin said. And so the file was closed, again.
That appears to have been Jeffrey’s last, best hope.
The next time the CCAS was called on the file, the little boy was dead.
One of the things that has always haunted the paramedic, Marc Dugas, is that no one from the family seemed upset when he and the other emergency responders got to the house. No one asked to ride in the ambulance with Jeffrey.
“No one cared,” Dugas said flatly.
He was outraged, but better it was him and the big firefighter, Capt. Royal Bradley, tending to the body of that poor child than any of those whose actions or neglect put him on that stretcher.