Sam Cooper And Suzanne Fournier, The Province June 28, 2011
Lawrence Jewett, manager of Cultus Lake Village trailer park, pried open the door of the trailer to reach the disabled girl he saw sitting next to her dead mom.Photograph by: Gerry Kahrmann -PNG, The Province
The severely ill mother and her mentally challenged daughter hadn't been seen for days. So on Sept. 14, 2010, Lawrence Jewett, manager of the Cultus Lake Village trailer park, walked over with another tenant and put a ladder up to their front window.
Jewett climbed up and looked inside. He saw the 15-year-old girl sitting on a couch with her mother on the floor beside her. Neither was moving.
"It was clear [the mother] was dead," Jewett recalled. "We called police and they said to just leave the scene as it was. But no one who was a parent could leave the girl that way, so we got the door open and took her out.
"She was in really rough shape," Jewett said. "She'd lost about 35 to 40 pounds. Her Depends [adult diaper] hadn't been changed and she was pretty upset. Just kept saying, 'Mommy's sleeping.' I took her back to our house and my wife Edith cleaned her up, gave her a bath. Then she started saying, 'Mommy's gone to heaven.'"
An investigation by B.C.'s child-welfare watchdog that finds "stunning" neglect by childcare workers says the teen girl with Down syndrome, who can't be named, had cuddled up to the rotting corpse of her mother for about seven days, trying to wake and feed her, tortured by buzzing flies and filthy rashes.
"Empty boxes of uncooked macaroni and bottles of her mother's prescription medicine were strewn around," says the report by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.'s representative for children and youth.
"It appeared that the girl had been trying to feed herself and care for her mother. The girl had been curling up in a dirty blanket, huddling tight against her mother's decomposing body. The trailer was full of flies, and the smell made it difficult for people to remain inside."
Turpel-Lafond says it is remarkable the teen, now recovering in the care of expert foster parents, didn't die. She continues to fear flies and "experience a range of emotions in response to what happened, including both grief and anger, according to her foster family."
As horrific and traumatic and heartbreaking as it is for the confused girl to be left in filth trying to revive a dead parent, Turpel-Lafond said, it's just as bad that childcare workers missed danger signals and flubbed four childprotection investigations because they didn't know their roles and failed to communicate with each other.
In her report, Turpel-Lafond found the girl had become "invisible" to the system. Her needs were overshadowed by those of her mother, who was able to hide her parental failings from care workers in her desperation to keep her child.
The 57-year-old mother had become increasingly ill, could barely walk and was unable to access care available to the family.
The girl's father had left the mother soon after she was born and committed suicide in the U.S.
Turpel-Lafond said when community members and family repeatedly complained the "alcoholic" mother was neglecting and even abusing her daughter, child-protection investigators failed to find the girl was in danger, partly by failing to contact relevant sources.
Turpel-Lafond also noted that the single mother's income assistance was cut off with no followup, which increased the difficulty for the family that was described by one worker as living in economic circumstances that were "less than zero."
"We could have prevented what happened to this child, being left with her deceased mother for this period of time," Turpel-Lafond said.
"I think it was needless and quite cruel -the suffering she experienced in this injury, but also three years prior to her mother's death, the staggering lack of attention to her needs and well-being."
The girl went without proper medication and attention for her hearing disability, needlessly living "in a world gone quiet," for an unknown amount of time, the report says.
Details of the report suggest the relationship of the mother and daughter was troubled by violence on both sides and twisted by the mother's addiction and "abject poverty."
But the report also notes the mother "loved her daughter to her best ability," and was just able to manage until she spiralled deeper into poverty after crashing her car and losing two jobs in April 2010.
http://www.theprovince.com/Abject+poverty+drugs+violence/5015418/story.html#ixzz1REPZuKXQ
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