Horrific death of B.C. ‘miracle baby’ renews calls for change

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Caution: This story contains disturbing details about abuse and death inflicted upon a child

Colby was lovingly nicknamed “the miracle baby” when he was born in 2009, as his twin did not survive their emergency birth.

In the neonatal intensive care unit at B.C. Children’s Hospital, he needed a life-saving operation at just four days old, followed by more surgeries for his heart, kidneys and lungs, as well as a long list of medications and followup appointments with specialists once he came home.

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“He was like taking care of a doll. He was so small, (it was) hard to feed him. You would have to take your finger and massage down the front of his throat to help him get it down,” a relative recalled.

Colby had complex health needs that would have been complicated for any parent, but were even more challenging for his family due to poverty, intergenerational trauma, and a lack of support in their small Indigenous community.

As a young boy with tousled dark hair and brown eyes, Colby had a gentle spirit and a wide smile. He loved kicking a soccer ball, the power of monster trucks, reading Archie comics, and playing the video game Minecraft — the things many boys enjoy at 11 years old, the age when Colby died.

But his existence bore little resemblance to the lives of most children.

He and a sister, who was three years younger, endured “horrific abuse and torture” in the home of their mother’s cousin Staci, who was approved to look after the kids by social workers after they were removed from their parents’ custody.

The children were isolated — not allowed to go to school, see other family members or attend Colby’s crucial medical appointments.

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On Feb. 26, 2021, a thin, tiny Colby was beaten for nine minutes, a brutal attack that left him unresponsive. After 40 minutes, Staci phoned 911, but it was too late. He was declared brain-dead a week later, removed from life support a few days before his 12th birthday.

Child services workers from Colby’s First Nation knew there were documented concerns about Staci and her partner’s previous treatment of children, but they never once checked on Colby and his sister while they were in the home for more than a year.

Government social workers, who were legally responsible for the kids but deferred to the Indigenous team, never did a background check on the caregivers. And they didn’t visit Colby and his sister during the seven months leading up to his death, a violation of policies.

Colby’s case is chronicled in a new report released Tuesday by Jennifer Charlesworth, B.C.’s representative for children and youth. The report, said to be the biggest investigation by the representative’s office since the government created it in 2006, concluded his death was preventable and was not an outlier.

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“The ways in which the systems of care let his family down have been experienced by many other children and families in B.C. and across Canada,” says the report titled Don’t Look Away — How one boy’s story has the power to shift a system of care for children and youth.

Colby’s real name and the First Nation he hails from were not named in the document to protect the family’s identity.

His caregivers, Staci and her partner Graham, both pseudonyms, were sentenced in 2023 to 10 years in prison for manslaughter and six years for aggravated assault.

It is too simple, and inaccurate, to merely blame decisions by child support workers for this tragedy, the report said. Many people told the representative that, after Colby’s death, they agonized about what more they could have done to help him, including medical workers, school staff and family members.

“Colby’s story broke our hearts, but it built our conviction that caring for a child takes much more than one person,” the report says.

“In Colby’s story, there was no one thing or one person who could be held wholly responsible. Instead, we see a web of actions and inactions and dozens of missed opportunities across an entire system.”

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For this investigation, Charlesworth sought guidance from cultural advisers and her staff spoke with nearly 2,000 people, including Indigenous leaders, government and health authority staff, community sector agencies, and family and kinship carers. They reviewed 6,437 injuries and deaths of children in government care or receiving services in 2023/24.

The report makes a number of recommendations, which Charlesworth wrote cannot be ignored, as recommendations in other reports have been in the past. They include:

• The province must collaborate with Indigenous leaders to create a Child and Youth Well-being Action Plan to ensure a sustained approach to caring for kids, one that addresses the ongoing harms of colonization and racism. It should include funding for community healing, and to support First Nations’ transition towards full jurisdiction over child welfare.
• The Ministry of Children and Family Development must address the factors causing unhealthy working conditions for its staff, in particular those in child protection and family service.
• All government ministries that work with children must dismantle the “pervasive colonial systems” that sustain biases in public services.
• Ministries, health authorities and public agencies that work with children must share data about how youth are faring across the areas of health, education, and social-emotional well-being. They must also identify key measures of child well-being that can be used by multiple public organizations so they all know what is working and what isn’t.

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Charlesworth included short-term actions that ministry workers could address right away, including system changes that would prompt more questions about violence risks in families; education to better understand the impact of family violence on children; improving the assessment of and support for temporary kinship arrangements, including respite and training; enabling families to address smaller issues, such as money to pay outstanding utility bills or for specialized equipment for a child, before they become major issues.

The report also said ministry workers must respond when other sectors, such as health, education or police, say they haven’t seen a child. In other words, these groups must work together and no longer in silos.

Stories of 14 other children in eight families are included in the report because none of them received appropriate support either. Nearly all endured violence, poverty, and poor housing, as well as being impacted by mental health and substance use in the family.

Three of these children died.

“There was minimal oversight and ‘eyes on’ for many of the children, especially those in (Indigenous) kinship care arrangements,” the report says.

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The report applies to all children in care, but was written through an Indigenous lens because two thirds of kids in care are Indigenous despite representing less than 10 per cent of B.C.’s total child population.

Colby was the second oldest of five children.

His mother Violet, who died of toxic drug poisoning 20 months after Colby’s death, was a high school graduate who liked to braid the hair of young girls before cultural dances. She was also a street fighter who would make money from these matches.

Violet, who was raised in a chaotic home, had been determined to raise her five children in a more stable environment, but was unable to achieve that due to poverty, violence, housing insecurity, substance use and interactions with police and social workers, the report said.

Violet needed extensive wraparound supports to properly care for her children, but the help she received from the ministry and her Nation were not sufficient.

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Her kids were eventually put into care at a time when First Nations were taking over responsibilities for child welfare. There was “confusion” and a “lack of clarity,” though, between Indigenous and government workers around decision making and accountability for the families, the report says.

When Nation workers suggested Violet’s cousin Staci and her partner could look after the children, ministry workers agreed without doing their regular checks — mainly because they were told that First Nations knew best what Indigenous children need.

The decision to put Colby and his sister in Staci’s home, however, was made without consulting his mother, the children’s two different fathers, or the maternal and paternal grandmothers, some of whom were willing to care for the kids. The maternal grandmother said she, Violet and the children didn’t know Staci well at all.

The small B.C. community where Colby came from continues to suffer harms from the legacy of settler colonialism and generations of racism, but is on a “healing journey” that is attempting to mend fractures among its troubled people, the report said.

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The story of Colby’s abuse did not come to light until his caregivers’ trial in 2023.

B.C. Provincial Court Judge Peter La Prairie said in his ruling that the children were starved and forced to eat feces, vomit and dog food. They were also slapped, punched, kicked and whipped, with much of the abuse captured by video cameras inside the home.

Colby’s sister survived but had multiple abrasions and bruises all over her body, and injuries to her wrists and ankles from zip ties.

Social workers who failed to check on the children are no longer employed by the ministry. Former Children’s Minister Mitzi Dean was demoted out of this ministry in January, and observers believe this case was one of the main reasons.

lculbert@postmedia.com

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