VANCOUVER – A coroner’s report confirms a teenager whose death cast scrutiny on the province’s practice of placing at-risk foster children in hotels deliberately jumped from a hotel window.
The BC Coroners Service released its report on the death of Alex Gervais, an 18-year-old who was placed by the Children’s Ministry in an Abbotsford Super 8 motel after his group home was closed.
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The report by coroner Adele Lambert says Gervais had non-lethal concentrations of cocaine and other drugs in his system before he died after deliberately jumping through a fourth-floor window of the motel in September 2015.
Lambert describes the teenager as “very sensitive and fearful of rejection” and says he threatened to kill himself in January 2013 but a hospital assessment concluded he had “zero risk of suicide.”
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She says in the weeks before his death, Gervais frequently threatened suicide when arguing with his girlfriend, and the day before he had been using drugs, was angry and distraught and was not sleeping.
Immediately after his death, the ministry said it housed children in hotels in only in extreme circumstances, but in January it issued a report that revealed 117 foster children had been placed in hotels between November 2014 and October 2015.