Ashley Smith was ‘ still breathing,’ officer repeats four times in recording

TORONTO —

The jurors at the Ashley Smith coroner’s inquest had just listened to Candace Wade as she was captured on videotape from Sept. 30, 2007.

Then an acting correctional manager and the officer- incharge at Grand Valley Institute for Women in Kitchener, Ont., Wade was also running the video camera and providing play- by- play commentary for the purposes of the record.

The teenager was a proper terror that day, tying ligature after ligature; no sooner would correctional officers cut one off and leave her cell, Ashley would have another on her neck. She was also hiding herself so staff couldn’t see her.

And after weeks of criticism and censure for rushing into her cell too soon, the COs, for their part, were increasingly paralyzed about what to do about it. To paraphrase an old Clash song, the guards were reduced to asking, “Should I stay or should I go in the cell now?”

It was all a terrible practise run for Ashley’s death, in the same manner in the same place and in virtually identical circumstances, 19 days later. But this day, the COs already had gone into her cell twice to cut off nooses. It was crystal- clear that Wade had taken the prison’s new marching orders — not to enter Ashley’s cell unless she’d stopped breathing — to heart.

She was obsessing on the 19- year- old’s breathing — which is to say, was she breathing?

“Ashley is tying another one,” Wade said at about 2: 45 p. m. “She’s coughing. The last two were quite tight.”

Wade said, “I can’t see her right now.” Then, “She’s moving. I note that she’s wheezing. She’s, like, gagging. I don’t know and I can’t see.”

Then, “She’s moving though, so that’s good.

“I note she’s still breathing,” she added.

As Julian Roy, lawyer for Ashley’s family, pointed out, Wade put those two words — “still” and “breathing” — together no fewer than four times on this tape.

Then, “She’s still breathing, her gown’s moving up and down.”

A bit later, Wade said it was uncertain “whether or not she’s breathing” and then noted, a eureka moment, “Oh, I just saw her move. I can see her gown just moved again, so she is breathing.”

A bit later still, she said, “I just saw Ashley move her leg. She has her foot put up against the wall, so it’s quite clear she’s still breathing or she wouldn’t have her foot like that.”

Why would she so focus on the teen’s breathing if she hadn’t adopted management’s new dictum?

Why was she reduced to reading the tea leaves — the imperceptible movement of Ashley’s white security gown as, presumably, her chest rose; the placement of a foot braced against the wall — before deciding the guards should go in to cut off the ligature?

So that’s what Wade said back then, as recorded by none other than Wade.

But in questions from inquiry counsel Jocelyn Speyer, and later in cross- examination, Wade sort of admitted to having bought the company line, but only sort of.

As she told Howard Rubel, lawyer for the guards’ union, Wade admitted it sure looked as though she were on board.

“It sounds that way, doesn’t it?” she said once. She agreed that trying to determine if Ashley was breathing by the look and placement of her foot was ludicrous, or, as she said, “I was doing it to justify to myself that she must be OK.”

As for her failure to tell Waterloo Regional Police, who investigated Ashley’s death as a potential homicide, about the new orders — this had the effect of throwing the COs under the bus, with some of them charged criminally, the charges tossed only after a preliminary hearing revealed they’d been told to stay out of the cell — Wade said, “I was as candid as I could be, sir.”

She ascribed her lack of candour to the detective who interviewed her. “He was very rude and aggressive towards me,” she snapped. “He called me a management puppet … I may have had my back up,” she said. “Because I had the best intentions and my truest heart” going into the interview.

Jurors also heard an audio tape Monday, this of Wade talking of another situation on Sept. 29, 2007.

She had phoned a partner, also in corrections, to seek his advice about a problem that had arisen during a use- of- force in Ashley’s cell. In the course of it, the meal slot to her cell was opened, and Ashley reached out to grab at a guard’s keys. The guard slammed the door to the slot down on Ashley’s arm to get her to stop; the guard has testified at the inquest, and described the incident himself in his straightforward way.

But Wade, again running the camera, immediately turned the lens away from that scene, and then said to her friend, “Should I just lose the tape, eh?” He agreed. The tape was discovered missing only during the course of the coroner’s investigation. It appears to be still missing.

But Wade now says that she didn’t destroy it or tape over it, but rather “handed it in.”

She was demoted from her management position as a result, and is once again working as a CO, which may explain her newly discovered affection for her colleagues.

As Roy pointed out in his cross, when she was a manager herself and still ambitious, Wade was happy to “point the finger down, but you did not point the finger up” the chain to management?

A few minutes later, Wade burst into tears. Roy suggested a break, but when the coroner asked if she wanted one, Wade explained, “I’m a highly emotional person, I’m passionate. I’m passionate. That’s what you’re seeing now, sir.”

Sadly, it seems that what Candace Wade is most passionate about is Candace Wade, or as she put it countless times, “I’d like to think I tried my best” — you know, in her truest heart.