Starved boy’s sister takes witness stand
Starved boy’s sister takes witness stand
It is the most ghastly video, the one of Alex Radita’s 15th birthday party.
Three months still from his eventual death, he was already stick-thin, so weak he struggled with bird limbs to open the cards and presents as around him, some of his seven siblings squealed with delight, as though all were well in the charnel house and it was perfectly normal to give a teenage boy with red sunken eyes a teddy bear, or to cry “Ohhh, a puppy!,” about a card for him with a dog on it.
In the witness stand Tuesday, one of Alex’s sisters stood in a hooded sweatshirt, watching the video on a screen.
Until this moment, she had been able to carry on as though nothing was awry, in the way that traumatized children can do, must do.
Oh yes, she said, Alex’s mood may have been “kinda a little down,” but that was “probably because he was not feeling the best.”
He was sort of sick at the time, she said, and when she was asked with what, replied, “Like the daily sickness” — a grotesque echo of something the youngsters in the Radita home likely heard as a mantra — and explained that was “when you had a cough or a sore back or something, I don’t know.”
But when she watched her brother on the video, politely saying thanks with his skeletal dignity, the girl’s frail composure cracked, and she wept. Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Judge Karen Horner called for a short break.
The girl, who is a minor, was called by lawyers for Emil and Rodica Radita, respectively 59 and 53, who are on trial for first-degree murder in the May 7, 2013, death of Alexandru, or Alex, as he was called by his brothers and sisters.
Earlier in the girl’s testimony, the parents accused of starving their diabetic son to death occasionally smiled benevolently in the prisoners’ box, the father several times practically beaming with delight as, on other more benign videos, he watched and heard the sounds of his brood as they giggled and goofed about in the family van.
But the parents’ direct view of their daughter, and hers of them, was blocked by a giant screen.
They were allowed to see her only on a TV monitor.
Alex died of a raging bacterial infection secondary to his malnutrition and untreated and mismanaged Type 1 diabetes. He weighed only 17 kg (37 pounds), with ulcerating sores — holes really — on his ruined body. At the time of his death, he was wearing a diaper.
The girl, her name and age protected by a publication ban, frequently giggled as lawyer Andrea Serink showed her family pictures and played short videos taken in 2010 in the family van, the intent apparently to paint the Raditas as normal and loving.
She was, as Crown attorney Marta Juzwiak gently pointed out, quite young in the early videos, and was a little embarrassed now to see herself in them.
In fact, the family was far from typical, as Juzwiak managed to elicit in her brief cross-examination, when the girl agreed that her parents “didn’t believe in doctors because of religion,” and that none of the children was taken to a doctor when they were ill.
She once dislocated her knee on a trampoline, for instance, and her mother “massaged” it back into alignment, though the girl admitted, with a rueful shrug, that maybe it wasn’t the best way.
Similarly, she said, as Alex grew more ill in the last five months of his life, the parents didn’t take him for medical help.
Alex was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes when he was just a toddler, and had had several close calls in British Columbia, where the family was then living.
He was taken to hospital just hours from death, and B.C. doctors were so alarmed by his parents’ curious resistance both to treating the boy’s diabetes — he required both long- and short-acting insulin — and to getting help only at the last moment that they called in social workers.
Alex was then apprehended for a year, and it was, at least by external measures, the best year of his life — with proper diabetes management and care, he thrived, even grew chubby, and did well at school.
But in 2005 a B.C. judge returned him to his parents’ care, and the careful monitoring of Alex that was supposed to happen didn’t, in part because the parents evaded appointments and in part because in the mix of busy professionals treating him, the boy’s case was lost.
The family moved to Calgary in 2009, a social worker didn’t follow up with a phone call, and Alex never registered on any official radar. He saw no doctors and went to no schools.
The Raditas, through their lawyers, have admitted they “mismanaged” Alex’s care, but are pleading not guilty to murder.
After much hemming and hawing, the defence lawyers finally told Judge Horner Tuesday the girl would be their only witness. Closing arguments begin Wednesday.