Grandma called shots over social worker
TORONTO — It is frankly delightful, in its own awful way, what unfolded Thursday at the Ontario coroner’s inquest into the Nov. 30, 2002, death of little Jeffrey Baldwin.
In the witness stand for the second day was Margarita Quintana, the key social worker for the family from the Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto.
She was being taken through her examination-inchief by Jordan Goldblatt, lawyer for the union that represents agency workers.
In truth, it is Goldblatt who is actually giving the evidence.
Through a combination of a charming but thick Spanish accent (she is originally from Chile) and the fact that she is what Jerry Seinfeld famously called a low talker, Quintana, even holding the microphone to her mouth like a lounge singer, is difficult to understand.
So Goldblatt has taken to basically repeating each of her answers.
In any case, they were exploring the events of the spring of 1998.
In the extended family of the little boy, it was situation normal: all f---ed up.
Jeffrey’s young parents, Yvonne Kidman and Richard Baldwin, were still quarrelling, still barely hanging on, just barely coping with Jeffrey, who was about a year old, and his sister, who was about two.
Meanwhile, behind Yvonne’s back, her mother, Elva Bottineau, was still feeding information to the CCAS about her daughter’s shortcomings, real and imagined. Sometimes Bottineau enlisted Yvonne’s sisters in her de facto snitch line.
Yvonne, of course, was also pregnant with her fourth child.
Yvonne and Richard made the babies, and Bottineau and husband Norman Kidman, with the approval of family court and the blessing of the CCAS, snatched them. This was the curious family dynamic set in stone.
At this point, the grandparents had custody of only one of the children.
By now, the CCAS had been throwing resources and money at Yvonne and Richard for about three years, to no discernible effect: They remained not terribly interested parents, volatile, poor, angry and inept.
But that March, there was a big kerfuffle at a welfare office: Yvonne allegedly shook one or both of the children in full view of the welfare staff, and sooner than you could say Jack the bear, Quintana swung into action.
One of the first things she did was call Yvonne’s parents, Bottineau and Norman Kidman, to tell them the agency now wanted to apprehend the children.
The grandparents and Quintana headed to the scene, arriving there together, according to Richard, no doubt surely by chance.
In short order, Quintana told the young parents the agency wanted to apprehend the kids.
Yvonne and Richard, who have testified here already, didn’t want that.
Miraculously, according to Quintana, they allegedly came up with a plan for Bottineau and Norman Kidman to take them instead. (The young parents’ version of events is that Quintana basically told them it was give up the kids, and send them off to strangers, or let Bottineau and Norman Kidman have them.)
Coincidentally, this was a version of the very plan — getting the two kids — Bottineau had mentioned to Quintana a month earlier, as part of her purported concern for the young ’uns.
Next thing you know, Quintana was writing, at Bottineau’s request, welfare officials to report that the two kids “were placed in the care” of Bottineau and that the agency would be applying for a six-month supervision order.
Why would she write that letter, Goldblatt asked.
“Because probably she needed the child tax benefit,” Quintana replied.
Alas, that supervision order — which would have allowed the agency to monitor Jeffrey and his siblings — never materialized.
All Quintana remembered is that “the grandparents got custody.”
By May 4, Quintana was noting that Bottineau had called in to report she indeed had gone to family court to get custody of Jeffrey and his sister.
“Mrs. Bottineau,” she concluded in the note, “felt that our involvement is not needed anymore.”
Goldblatt asked why she’d reported that.
“Because that’s what she said,” Quintana replied with a small smile.
“Certainly, you weren’t taking instructions from Elva, were you?” Goldblatt asked. “No,” Quintana said. Heaven forbid. But, surely as night follows day, guess what happened next?
Quintana and her supervisor at the CCAS then decided to close the file on the case — oh! the merry coincidence of it all! — and end the agency’s involvement with the family.
“We didn’t have further protection concerns about the children being in the care of Yvonne and Richard,” Quintana said.
“Because they were with the grandparents?” Goldblatt asked. “Yes,” Quintana said. Goldblatt pointed out that Yvonne was yet again pregnant and asked whether that played any role in the decision to close the file.
“We didn’t have a child yet,” Quintana replied serenely. “The baby was not born. We didn’t have a child to open a file.” Yes, the agency merely had two parents supposedly so awful they couldn’t be trusted with their own children, so why worry about the new one on the way?
Bottineau may not have been actually giving Quintana marching orders, but then, she didn’t need to do so: They were as one.
Bottineau and Kidman are in prison, convicted of murder in Jeffrey’s death from septic shock and pneumonia secondary to chronic starvation. He was five.
Quintana resumes testifying Monday.