Finally, the truth about Eva’s last day
On July 8, 2013, the GTA saw a torrential downpour in the late afternoon that led to flooding and stranded commuters. At the same time, parents in Vaughan arrived at 343 Yellowood Circle to pick up their children from a home daycare. In the back seat of a
Olena Panfilova, the owner of the daycare Eva attended in Vaughan, pleaded guilty on April 4 to criminal negligence causing the death of the 2-year-old. Sentencing is scheduled for May 19. The maximum sentence for that charge is life imprisonment, according to the Criminal Code.
“I wake up with Eva and I go to bed with Eva. Every single minute I have her on my mind,” the girl’s mother, Ekaterina Evtropova, previously told the Star. “I don’t want anything like this to happen to any other child — to any other parents as well.”
The case spurred a Star investigation into lax child-care inspections and prompted changes to provincial daycare laws.
But the details surrounding what happened to Eva remained unknown for years, only coming to light recently in the agreed statement of facts, which was read before Judge David Stewart Rose in a Newmarket court.
“I did not know that that little girl died in a car until I heard that agreed statement of facts,” said lawyer Patrick Brown, who is representing Eva’s parents in a lawsuit against the province and the daycare operators.
“I can’t say that for the family either. They may have let her (mother) know but I don’t think she fully knew until this.”
Eva began attending Panfilova’s daycare when she was 11 months old. Her parents, Evtropova and Vycheslav Ravikovich, were referred to Panfilova by “trusted friends,” according to the agreed statement of facts.
The daycare was popular with Russianspeaking parents, as Panfilova spoke Russian, and offered lower rates than licensed daycares — if a parent paid for the entire year in advance, the cost was between $500 and $700 a month.
The daycare also offered pickup and drop-off services, which Eva’s parents took advantage of. On July 8, 2013, Panfilova picked Eva up and placed her in the car seat behind the driver’s seat. Her three-row Dodge Durango was filled with “a number of children.”
When Panfilova arrived at her home and daycare facility on Yellowood Circle around 9:30 a.m., she removed all the children she could from the passenger side and closed the door, leaving only Eva, still buckled in her car seat, according to the statement of facts.
Panfilova had 35 children in her daycare that day, despite the five-child limit mandated by the province for an unlicensed daycare at the time. Parents were led to believe Panfilova was taking care of 15 children at most, the statement of facts said.
Meanwhile, Eva, whom her parents previously described as a “very mature and clever child,” sat in the car, which rapidly grew hotter. The day, described as “a hot humid day” in the agreed statement of facts, saw highs of 30 C and lows of 18 C. But in a car parked for hours, Eva felt temperatures far beyond that.
“It is likely that on July 8, 2013, Olena’s Dodge Durango, while parked in the driveway of her daycare, heated up to at least 50 C inside by approximately 12:30 p.m.,” the statement of facts read.
All day Eva sat inside the car — wearing a purple dress, a diaper and blue and white sandals — restricted by her safety-approved, five-point seatbelt harness.
Parents began arriving to pick up their children between 4:30 and 5 p.m. All the while, Eva remained — forgotten — in her car seat.
Eva’s mother called Panfilova at 4:31 p.m. to ask that her daughter be dropped off at her grandmother’s house. Panfilova agreed, but offered a later drop-off time, citing the afternoon’s heavy rainfall. Still, Eva remained in the car. It was not until some time between 5:06 and 5:21 p.m. that Panfilova realized she hadn’t brought Eva inside. Eva was already dead.
Panfilova brought the little girl into the house, placed her on the couch and removed her shoes, before calling out to her adult daughter Karina Rabadanova for help.
Acall was made to Eva’s mother, but there was no answer. Her father was called next, and in a 13-second conversation Panfilova told him his daughter was blue and not breathing. Then they called 911. “What is your emergency?” the operator asked.
“We’re taking care of a kid and — and I think she’s dead,” Rabadanova said, according to the statement of facts. “We put her down for a nap. We went to wake her up and she’s not breathing and she’s like all … purple.”
The paramedics arrived within minutes to find Eva’s diaper dry and her jaw unable to open with the onset of gross rigor mortis. They described her as “obviously dead.”
An autopsy performed by Dr. Michael Pollanen found that Eva’s bladder contained “no urine” and her stomach was essentially empty. Her dried lips and “parchment-like yellow areas” on her face hinted at the truth: exposure to heat.
On the night of the incident, Panfilova gave a recorded statement to the police, maintaining the story she told earlier that day: She put Eva down for a nap in the afternoon, went to check on her later, and found her not breathing.
Panfilova and her family also denied knowing anything when police could not find a digital video recorder they believed was connected to cameras showing the front entrance of the daycare and the driveway. The car seat Eva sat in on the day of her death was also missing.
Children dying from heatstroke in cars is not very common in Ontario, according to Dr. Dirk Huyer, chief coroner for Ontario. Since 2000, there have been only three recorded cases. In the U.S., 37 children die in hot cars each year on average, or “about one every nine days,” according to Janette Fennell, founder and president of KidsAndCars.org. Huyer and Fennell were not involved with Eva’s case.
Heatstroke can occur after anywhere from 15 to 20 minutes up to two or three hours, Sharon Ramagnano, manager of trauma services at Sunnybrook Hospital, who was not involved with Eva’s case, told the Star during an interview about heatstroke in general.
“Eventually you lose consciousness and organs fail and the heart will stop,” Ramagnano said.
Because children’s sweat glands are not fully developed, their temperatures rise three times faster than adults, the Canada Safety Council previously wrote in a news release about children’s vulnerability to heatstroke in cars.
Symptoms of heatstroke can include nausea, vomiting, headaches, abdominal cramping, diarrhea, fever and chills, according to Ramagnano.
“It’s very quick. It doesn’t take very long if you’re in direct sunlight and there’s no open ventilation,” she said. “The heat inside a car even with a cracked window is way beyond what you feel outside. It can have detrimental effects within minutes.”
The conditions of Panfilova’s daycare were in question even before Eva’s death. She had received an explicit warning from the Ministry of Education that the facility was illegally crowded. Despite this, she never applied for or obtained the required licence to run a daycare with more than five children.
In November 2012, two Ministry of Education employees inspected the daycare and discovered seven children in the facility. The ministry sent Panfilova a letter, dated Nov. 26, 2012, telling her to reduce the number of children in her care. She did not.
When police were called to the daycare on July 8, 2013, there were more than a dozen dogs on the premises, along with the children, and there were bags of dirty diapers in the kitchen. The daycare was later shuttered by health authorities who found dangerous bacteria and filthy conditions in the home, the Star previously reported, after a freedom of information request was filed by the Ontario Coalition for Better Child Care.
The Ministry of Education revealed in August 2013 that it had failed to follow up on 25 of 448 complaints about unlicensed daycare crowding in the 18 months before Eva died, including four at 343 Yellowood Circle.
Last March, Panfilova, her husband, Ruslan Panfilov, and Rabadanova were sentenced to 30 days in jail for running an overcrowded, unlicensed daycare, a violation of the Day Nurseries Act.
“In my defence I would like to say I was trying to help the parents. I was trying to help people who weren’t able to pay large amounts of money,” the Star reported Panfilova said at the time, through an interpreter. “It was my beloved work.”
The law that was in place at the time of Eva’s death has since been replaced by the Child Care and Early Years Act. That law increases penalties for overcrowding in unlicensed daycares.
Now, Eva’s parents are pushing forward with a $3.5-million lawsuit against the province and the owners and operators of the unlicensed daycare.
During a news conference in 2013, Eva’s mother said she now has “nothing to live for,” except for pushing to make daycares safer.
“I know that this is my job now,” Evtropova said. “I have no other choice.” With files from Alex Ballingall, Laurie Monsebraaten and Marco Chown Oved