UNBELIEVABLE DESTRUCTION
Family coping with aftermath of trauma, slow-moving court case
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, left, and Fort McMurray Fire Chief Darby Allen look over the charred devastation during a visit Friday. The prime minister lauded the bravery of the fire crews, whose efforts kept the blaze from engulfing the rest of the city.
Two days after celebrating her son’s first birthday, Jessi Hassall headed off to work; her son stayed home with her boyfriend, just as he’d done for the last two weeks.
She didn’t know her little boy, Spencer, would never be the same again (Postmedia is not publishing Spencer’s last name to protect his privacy). About 15 minutes after she arrived at her job in Saskatoon on Jan. 19, 2015, Hassall got a call from her boyfriend telling her that Spencer wasn’t breathing.
“I never thought that would be the call that I would receive,” she said.
She rushed home, and she and her mother rushed Spencer to the hospital, meeting the ambulance partway there. For those agonizing first minutes — and for the next nine days — Hassall didn’t know what had happened to her boy, that he had allegedly been shaken and traumatically injured. She said her boyfriend told her he had left Spencer in his crib, then checked on him and found him not breathing.
“When I went to pick up Spencer, he was pretty much like a wet noodle. There was really no other words to describe it,” Hassall said. “He was like a rag doll. He had absolutely no life to him at all.”
While emergency staff treated Spencer, police officers followed Hassall and her mother around the hospital. Over the coming days, health-care staff, police and social services workers would ask her repeatedly what had happened to cause Spencer’s brain to swell to such a state that he had to be put in an induced coma with a hole drilled in his head to relieve the pressure.
“They kept asking me what could have caused it. I had absolutely no idea,” Hassall said. A doctor told her the force Spencer experienced was equivalent to an adult being in a head-on car crash.
Nine days later, Hassall finally learned more of the story. She said both she and her now-exboyfriend, Brady Lupuliak, were asked to take lie-detector tests at the Saskatoon police station. She went in for hers in the morning, a process that took five hours. When she was leaving, she saw Lupuliak in the police lobby waiting for his lie-detector test.
Hassall returned to Spencer’s side at the hospital. About 15 minutes later, she said she received a call from Lupuliak and he told her a different version of events. Lupuliak was charged a few months later with aggravated assault. The allegations against him have not been proven in court and his case is being dealt with through the court system’s mental health strategy, where he has had about a dozen appearances and is due back in court on June 6.
Hassall and her mother said they are frustrated by how long the court case is taking, and how the professionals involved are wary of even referring to the incident as involving a shaken baby.
“When it comes to little kids, the kids can’t tell you what happened . ... All (the doctors) will say is that he had major trauma,” Hassall said.
She and her mother say there is not enough communication about the dangers of shaking babies, and a lot of silence around cases. It’s not something that’s easy to talk about, but they hope by talking about their situation, it will bring more awareness, they said.
Regardless of the outcome in court, the sentence for Spencer will be lifelong, Hassall said.
Before he was injured, Spencer was saying his first few words and getting ready to start walking. After he was brought out of his coma, he had no muscle control.
“It was starting back at scratch, getting him to hold his head up, sit, stand, move his arms, legs,” said Hassall’s mom, Treena Davis.
Spencer didn’t walk until he was 16 months old. He turned two in January, but he still doesn’t talk. It’s impossible to say whether his development will catch up or whether he will be affected for the rest of his life. For example, his eyesight is damaged because the trauma caused blood spattering behind his eyes. That’s one of the things that bothers his mom the most.
“If he is visually impaired, that means that because of this incident, my son will never be able to drive a car, or play sports,” Hassall said. “There’s just a lot that he might miss out on.”