Documents reveal police, hospital suspicions
Charlee Johanson’s favourite TV program was a game show that had contestants run an obstacle course while completing daring physical challenges.
The happy three-year-old often mimicked what she saw, climbing everything in sight, jumping and taking tumbles. The words used most often to describe her were “absolutely fearless,” rambunctious and invincible.
It appeared that, according to the story that was told to the public, Charlee’s tragic death on Feb. 12, 2015, was an accident that resulted in part from her lack of fear, her boldness, her desire to do whatever the big kids could do.
However, police have believed from the start that Charlee’s death was suspicious and investigated it as such. And three years later, the case remains open.
There have been no public updates since the days after Charlee’s death, but after almost two years of arguments in court, a provincial court judge has released to Postmedia News the documents filed by police in support of applying for search warrants, sealing orders and production orders in connection with their investigation.
Some of the information has been redacted so as not to compromise the continuing police work, however the documents do provide some insight into what happened the day Charlee died.
According to the documents, shortly after 7 p.m. on Feb. 11, 2015, Charlee’s mother, Jennifer Johanson, called 911 to report that her daughter had had a seizure and was not conscious.
Both she and her live-in boyfriend, Cody Graham, told the dispatcher that Charlee had bumped her head the previous day.
An ambulance arrived at their Surrey basement suite and took Charlee to Surrey Memorial Hospital. On the way, she went into respiratory distress and the ambulance was met by an advanced life-support vehicle. A paramedic from that unit rode with them to the hospital.
Charlee was assessed at Surrey Memorial and then transferred to B.C. Children’s Hospital in Vancouver, where she had surgery to try to relieve the pressure on her brain. It was not successful and the next day she was declared braindead.
On the evening of Feb. 12, Charlee was removed from life support.
Both Johanson and Graham provided separate voluntary statements to the police while Charlee was still in hospital, during which they were warned that anything they said could be used as evidence. Johanson was told that anyone who had contact with Charlee was a suspect.
The statements were summarized in the court documents.
Graham said he was taking care of Charlee on Feb. 10, 2015, when she fell and hit her head after jumping off a plastic tub she had been standing on to wash her hands in the bathroom. Graham heard Charlee fall and when he checked on her he saw red marks on her head and face, but she otherwise appeared normal. Johanson said she was at work at the time.
There were no symptoms until the next afternoon, when she was acting strangely at the park.
Charlee was stumbling, and when they stopped at McDonald’s for dinner she hardly ate. She went to bed around 6 p.m.
A short time later, Graham said, he heard a noise from the tent set up in the apartment where Charlee liked to sleep and saw her having a seizure. Johanson arrived home minutes later.
The couple scrambled to revive Charlee for about 15 minutes before calling an ambulance.
Johanson told police she had no concerns about Graham having hurt her child and characterized what happened as an accident.
Graham told police he loved Charlee and would never have done anything to hurt her.
Both Johanson and Graham offered to take polygraph tests.
When asked about suspects in the case, Integrated Homicide Investigation Team spokesman Cpl. Frank Jang said police question numerous people on any file, and did the same in Charlee’s case, including talking to Johanson and Graham.
“We absolutely question or interview those that were closest to our victim — the family, friends — and from there if we ascertain any other names that we feel would be beneficial to the investigation obviously we follow up and we question those people,” Jang said. “We don’t leave any stone unturned.”
During a brief online exchange, Johanson declined to be interviewed for this article, and said she no longer had any contact with Graham. Graham could not be reached for an interview.
According to the court documents, police based their initial theory that a homicide had possibly taken place on the fact that Charlee had died from massive head trauma and there was concern the injury could not have been caused by the events Johanson and Graham described.
The B.C. Ambulance crew that transported Charlee to the hospital thought the child’s injuries were suspicious, and the advanced life-support paramedic that accompanied her to the emergency room told hospital staff “to get the police involved.”
He had been a paramedic for 36 years and “he said he had a gut feeling that something was not right with the child.”
About 40 minutes after the initial 911 call, a B.C. Ambulance Service dispatcher contacted the Surrey RCMP to ask investigators to attend Surrey Memorial Hospital. An emergency-room physician told police that Charlee was unconscious and effectively on life support after sustaining a brain injury. He said the ambulance crew had deemed Charlee’s injuries suspicious.
The on-call Child Protection Services doctor at B.C. Children’s Hospital wrote in her report that there was “no history consistent with injury” and Charlee’s injury was “very concerning for inflicted trauma.” A critical-care physician at B.C. Children’s Hospital said there was concern that Charlee’s head injury was not accidental.
Overall, the doctors at the children’s hospital “did not believe that Charlee’s injuries were consistent with the story provided by Graham and Johanson regarding their cause,” according to one document filed by police with the court.
Physicians, ambulance attendants and the forensic pathologist who conducted the autopsy also noted that Charlee had bruises all over her body.
There was bruising on her right cheek, the right side of her nose, right side of her abdomen, the front of her left hip, the back of her left hip, the lower part of her right buttock, the top back side of her right thigh and right calf close to her knee.
According to the documents, Johanson and Graham, in their interviews, described Charlee as “crazy,” rambunctious and fearless — they had once caught her on the counter trying to climb on top of the fridge.
They said she fell often because she was always jumping off of things, and attributed the bruising to earlier events, such as a fall at the recreation centre, a wornout potty seat and an incident one week earlier where she had jumped on to a yoga ball and slipped, hitting her cheek on the coffee table.
One doctor noted in her report that she’d been told that Charlee was “an easy bruiser.”
The forensic pathologist who conducted Charlee’s autopsy, Dr. Dan Straathof, concluded that the child’s brain injury had caused her death, however he could not identify the cause of the injury during the autopsy or whether it was accidental.
He was also unable to determine when the other bruises on her body had occurred or what caused them.
Jang confirmed that police are still actively investigating Charlee’s case. No one has been arrested to date, and charges have not been recommended to Crown counsel.
Charlee’s death is being treated as suspicious, but Jang stopped short of calling it a homicide.
“The terminology that’s used by investigators in this file is that they’re treating it as a suspicious death,” he said. “It’s not a suicide, it doesn’t appear to be just a naturalcause death, but there are circumstances around this file that they deem suspicious.”
When asked about the length of time it’s taken to investigate, Jang said police would love to have all of the answers right away, but it takes as long as it takes to collect evidence — every case is different.
“It’s not lost on us that it’s a young girl that died, and our investigators are aware of that, and we are actively pursuing this investigation,” Jang said.
The Integrated Homicide Investigation Team is still collecting tips in this case, and if anyone has information they are asked to call the IHIT information line at 1-877551-4448 or, if they wish to remain anonymous, call Crime Stoppers at 1-800-222-TIPS.