EDMONTON – The office of the Child and Youth Advocate has completed its review into the death of a seven-year-old drowned at the O’Leary pool in north Edmonton.
It happened in August 2012 during a public swim day.
The young boy was spotted in the deep end of the main pool. Lifeguards pulled him out of the water and performed CPR in an attempt to revive him. Emergency crews were called but the boy passed away.
A review into the child’s death was ordered, and the 42-page report was made public on Tuesday.
“Jack was seven-years-old when he passed away,” said Child and Youth Advocate Del Graff. “The first five years of his life he lived with his parents and lived quite a transient lifestyle… The last two years of his life, he was in the temporary care of the child intervention services here in Alberta.”
The boy was living in a group home for just 11 days before he died.
Alberta’s Child and Youth Advocate paints a tragic picture of the young boy’s life.
“From birth, he was impacted by his parent’s substance misuse, and life with his parents was characterized by an unstable and transient lifestyle,” wrote Graff. “When he was brought into care, he was placed in a stable foster home, but struggled with relationships and mixed messages about his future.”
“His parents would convey to him that they were going to bring him home soon, and that he wouldn’t be in care much longer… when in fact, the more that time went on, the more unlikely it was that he was going to be returned home.”
In the report, Graff goes on to say attempts were made to provide a more permanent and stable future for the young boy, but at the time of his passing, that wasn’t the case.
“After being in care for almost two-and-a-half years, there was no certainty in his placement, no certainty in his relationships and no certainty in his future,” explained Graff in the report.
“Our focus isn’t about identifying responsibility or blame, it’s about trying to find ways to improve the system,” he said.
“There were some significant delays for Jack in terms of establishing permanent legal status, and we think that there can be some improvements made.”
NDP Human Services critic Rachel Notley believes a wait of two-and-a-half years is far too long.
“Those kinds of delays may be one thing in the life of a 42-year-old, but they are not acceptable in the two-and-a-half years in the life of a seven-year-old.”
Notley stresses the province must do better.
“”They need to put the resources necessary to ensure that applications related to custody of children are dealt with absolutely in a priority, expedited basis. They can’t be waiting for two-and-a-half years.”
“The other thing that these reports really show is that we have a problem with resources within the sytem,” Notley adds. “This little boy was in a number of different placements, he was actually in a group home at the age of seven… He had four different case workers over the course of that two-and-a half years.”
The report also brings up the Alberta government and the lack of rules about who decides what happens to a child’s body after a death in care. The boy’s tissues were donated without his parents’ consent.
“There was a request for a tissue donation shortly after he passed away, and there was only a two-hour window within which to make that decision, and there was virtually no policy guidance to deal with it,” said Graff.
The Child Advocate’s report is titled ‘7-year-old Jack’, but ‘Jack’ isn’t the boy’s name. Alberta’s privacy law prevents naming the boy.
Read the full 42-page Child and Youth Advocate report below:
Child and Youth Advocate report into drowning death of young Edmonton boy