The lost chance for Alex Radita
Custody order was denied by B.C. judge
It wasn’t the only or even the last opportunity to save Alexandru Radita, but it was indisputably the best shot.
In what the prophet Joel calls in the Bible “the valley of decision,” it all boiled down to one judge, one ruling, one day.
It came in December of 2004 in the form of a child protection hearing before Provincial Court Judge Gary Cohen in Surrey, B.C.
The provincial director of the B.C. Ministry of Children and Family Development (MCFD), the province’s vast child-welfare bureaucracy, was seeking an unusual “continuing custody order” that would keep the little diabetic boy, then almost six, in the permanent care of a foster mother.
Alexandru’s parents, Emil and Rodica Radita, and their lawyers were fighting hard to get him back with their seven other children.
Over eight days that year, three expert witnesses, the hospital pediatricians who had had involvement with Alexandru, the two lead social workers on the file, the foster mother and an access supervisor who had watched over family visits during the year the boy was in care all testified.
So did the parents, in their trademark chippy manner that invariably left most who dealt with them feeling equally spent and unsatisfied, as though they had just gone five rounds in a bowlful of Jell-O to no particular result.
The experts had one message for the judge: Alexandru was not safe with his parents.
He had barely escaped with his life 15 months earlier when he arrived at Surrey Memorial Hospital, his grossly mismanaged diabetes and distended belly like a child in the Third World prompting the MCFD to act.
The judge heard that this wasn’t a case of the parents not being capable or bright enough to take care of their little boy’s Type 1 diabetes, and it didn’t seem to be a direct function of their religiosity, though they were active members of the Romanian Apostolic Pentecostal Church.
As lead social worker Patricia MacDonald put it once, “They knew how to care for him (Alexandru). They had the doctors in place. They knew where to go. “They simply didn’t comply.” It was on Dec. 22, 2004, with counsel making final submissions, that the ministry’s lawyer Dean Tate was about to ask, “what’s going to stop” the parents from doing it again if they got him back, stop them from messing around so seriously with Alexandru’s insulin that his body couldn’t absorb the nutrients he needed and he starved, as had happened on Oct. 16, 2003.
Tate got as far as, “What’s…” before, characteristically, the judge interrupted him.
“What’s going to stop them?” Cohen asked, and even from the transcript the tone of his voice practically leaps from the page.
“They saw their child almost die this time,” Cohen snapped. “Do you think that will have no effect?”
Minutes later, he mused aloud: “Will they let the child — will they actually do anything as foolish as completely taking away one type of insulin again?
“It’s unlikely,” the judge said. “It’s, I suppose, always a possibility … but they would … they would have to be crazy to do it again.”
Tate murmured, “And again, because it’s to some degree speculative with respect to what the parents would do —” Again Cohen interrupted. “The speculation has to be resolved in favour of keeping the family together. It has to be.”
Tate objected, saying the paramount consideration always had to be the well-being and safety of the child; these two themes, the best interests of a child and keeping families together, are the predominant ones in all child welfare, with one or another floating to the top, depending on the times.
The judge said, “All right,” but added that “if we’re going to speculate there’s some possibility that putting this child back in that home might cause that child’s death, that has to be resolved in favour of testing it ...” In other words, Cohen was saying, the only way to find out if Alexandru could survive his parents was to return him to them.
And that’s just what the judge did, denying MCFD its custody order, and sending the boy back to the family under a six-month supervision order.
In the courtroom, Patricia MacDonald’s heart sank. “I knew he (Alexandru) was sentenced to death,” she says.
And nothing and no one stopped Emil and Rodica Radita, not before and certainly not after Cohen’s decision.
By the time Alex died in Calgary on May 7, 2013, a skeletal ruin of a 15-year-old weighing just 37 pounds, his parents had established a troubling pattern across three provinces.
The parents are pleading not guilty to first-degree murder in Alex’s death in a trial that is now on hold until the fall.
The pattern went like this: If the children in the Raditas’ growing brood appeared healthy, so they would remain, pretty much, except perhaps for the state of their teeth, which were markedly discoloured and in rough shape.
But if one of the kids fell ill or had a medical problem, the parents would resist diagnosis or treatment, dig in their heels while simultaneously arguing either that God would fix things or that the child’s condition was caused by something different, aggressively assert rights both real and imagined, and at some point, simply would pack up and move house, city or jurisdiction.
Twice in Ontario, in Windsor and in Kitchener, while there were ongoing child-protection investigations, they did just that.
One issue revolved around a baby boy (not Alex) who was born prematurely and needed to be on oxygen; Mrs. Radita objected, children’s aid was called and the child briefly apprehended. Then he developed a seizure disorder, and his mother demanded the medication be stopped; the parents relented only after children’s aid again became involved.
There was also the matter of a dead baby girl, her death at not-quite-four months of age still somewhat mysterious except to the Ontario coroner’s office, which investigated it but which is prohibited by privacy legislation from disclosing anything more than that.
Still, Postmedia has learned that the coroner’s report said the parents were new to Canada and unaware health care was available to them. But the Raditas had been in the country since August 1985; the baby died Jan. 8, 1991, almost six years later.
At the 2004 protection hearing in B.C., Cohen heard from MacDonald that the baby may have had “bronchial pneumonia,” as indeed she did.
MacDonald told the judge when she asked the parents for the baby’s birth and death dates so she could make further inquiries in Ontario, they flatly refused.
Of her dead daughter, Mrs. Radita testified in her flat cool way that “it was unfortunate that she died so quick. There was nothing anybody could do about.”
But she loved the baby’s name, she said, so she gave it to her very next girl, who was born about a year later.
So there was this pattern — and these difficult parents, oddly entitled and almost magnificently abstruse — that might reasonably have sent up red flags for anyone who was looking.
But everyone should have gone to school on what happened to Alex in the fall of 2003.
When he was brought to emerg at Surrey Memorial Hospital, he was hours from death. He had multi-system organ failure. He was so sick that Dr. Michael Seear, an expert in childhood malnutrition who saw him when he was transferred to B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, said he was too frail to intubate.
There, Alexandru was diagnosed with “severe starvation, pneumonia and septicemia,” and kwashiorkor, a condition normally seen only in children in the Third World and which is marked by a telltale swollen belly, and end-stage diabetic ketoacidosis, or DKA, the condition that develops if a diabetic hasn’t been getting sufficient insulin to maintain the delivery of nutrients to the cells.
A social worker at Children’s Hospital immediately alerted MCFD and the very next day, after a brief investigation, the agency decided to remove Alexandru from his parents.
It wasn’t the first time MCFD had considered such action.
When the boy was first diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes at the age of about two, the parents were so hostile to the diagnosis and at best so ambivalent about treatment, the agency considered applying for a supervision order.
But after mediation, the Raditas agreed to join a “family preservation program” in Surrey and did smashingly well at it — the therapist gave them glowing reviews — so the order was withdrawn.
But now Alex was almost dead, and the agency moved with laudable speed to apprehend him — though at first, it was a paper move only, because he was so sick he stayed in hospital for more than two months.
His foster mother was the late Vera Boyko (she died this year shortly before the criminal trial began), and in her care, Alexandru thrived.
By June of 2004, when then-RCMP Cpl. Charlene Beck interviewed him, he had morphed from a gaunt child too weak to lift his arms to a chubby chatterbox “who literally could not sit still. He was full of energy … He was a little porker.
“And he had a very logical brain for a six-year-old,” said Beck, who retired in 2013 after 25 years. Alex wanted to go home but not, he told her, until his parents learned how to give him insulin.
Beck recommended charges against the parents, and Crown attorneys agreed. The Raditas were charged with failing to provide the necessities of life and criminal negligence.
Beck wasn’t called to testify at the protection hearing, and assumed, when the charges she’d recommended didn’t materialize in a trial, that a plea bargain had been worked out.
But in fact, when Judge Cohen made his decision on Dec. 22, 2004 — he issued a 10-page written decision the following January — it was essentially a vindication of the Raditas; prosecutors stayed the charges.
The parents were under a supervision order of six months, meaning MCFD was to monitor them. After it expired, in the summer of 2005, Alex slowly fell off the societal radar.
It was only in early 2009, when he missed his second consecutive appointment at the Children’s Hospital diabetes clinic, that the hospital called MCFD to ask if they could find the family.
An intake worker actually got a forwarding address for the family in Calgary from a school. But the worker never dialed an Alberta number, explaining at the criminal trial, though it is hardly an explanation, “Not my role at that time.” She closed the file.
It’s unclear from the evidence at trial precisely when the Raditas moved to Calgary, but Alex was never enrolled in school in Alberta.
Judge Cohen was unavailable for comment. The Office of the Chief Judge, in response to a Postmedia request, said only, “A judge speaks once through his or her Reasons for Judgment” and it’s inappropriate to do otherwise.
But a judge also speaks through his or her conduct of a case.
As Cohen said on Dec. 9, 2004, with the hearing only halfway done, and he directed his remarks to Patricia MacDonald: “And just so that Ms. MacDonald hears this, she’s a very good social worker … I’m not in any way suggesting that we do not respect your work, but I think you missed it in this one.”
He added, prophetically, “everybody misses it occasionally.”
WILL THEY LET THE CHILD — WILL THEY ACTUALLY DO ANYTHING AS FOOLISH AS COMPLETELY TAKING AWAY ONE TYPE OF INSULIN AGAIN? — JUDGE GARY COHEN