A retired B.C. RCMP officer believes the recent tragedy involving a foster child who was abused, tortured and ultimately died in care won’t be the last failure of the province’s Ministry of Children and Family Development.
Russ Grabb still has his notes from May 11, 1993, when he attended the BC Children’s Hospital as the lead major crime investigator in a case of horrific toddler abuse.
“When I first saw her lying there naked with tubes coming out of her throat, trachea – she looked just like my own two-year-old daughter,” Grabb recalled in an interview Monday.
The two-and-a-half-year-old girl, who can only be identified as M.P. because B.C.’s superintendent of Family and Child Services had a family services file with her family at the time, ended up in a coma. According to Grabb, she was not expected to survive.
The toddler had been badly beaten in her home in Boston Bar by her own mother, who was later convicted of aggravated assault.
“I could see bruises head to toe, I could see her head horrifically swollen from all the internal bleeding,” Grabb said.
“It looked like her entire body was broken.”
Grabb said the incident broke his heart and contributed greatly to the PTSD he said he lives with today.
The former RCMP superintendent said he’s disappointed, but not surprised to learn two Indigenous foster parents were sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter and aggravated assault in the starvation and torture of two First Nations children in their care in Lake Errock, B.C., last month. One of them, an 11-year-old boy, died in February 2021 after a beating, weighing less than 65 pounds.
According to the evidence heard in the Chilliwack Law Courts in June, the Ministry of Children and Family Development hadn’t checked on the children for seven months.
“Lake Errock is the again that we all say should never happen again,” Grabb said.
M.P., who suffered serious injuries including multiple bruises and abrasions, retinal hemorrhages, kidney damage and a severe brain injury resulting in cerebral palsy, partial paralysis and blindness, was rendered permanently disabled.
A civil claim filed in B.C. Supreme Court by B.C.’s Public Guardian and Trustee on her behalf in 2010 alleges three ministry social workers were warned in February 1993 — three months prior to the assault — that M.P.’s mother had tried to drown her in the bathtub.
According to the lawsuit, none of the social workers advised or attempted to advise RCMP of the reported drowning attempt.
On May 4, 1993, days before the assault, M.P.’s older sister allegedly told a child-care worker with Hope Community Services that her mother was beating M.P.
“But for the negligence of the Defendants the Assault would not have occurred,” states the civil claim.
“It just makes me so sad, so angry,” Grabb said.
The ministry settled M.P.’s lawsuit in June 2011, paying out close to $2.7 million in damages for her future care.
“The common thread that defined my entire 30-year career in the RCMP is this notion of depraved indifference in the broader society and in bureaucracy,” Grabb told Global News.
“It keeps coming up and it never stops.”
The MCFD told Global News it cannot comment on specific cases due to privacy reasons, but in an emailed statement, the minister acknowledged the child welfare system needs substantial systemic changes.
“The horrific tragedy in Lake Errock has shown just how much more work we need to do, and that it needs to be done even faster,” Mitzi Dean said.
“I feel that responsibility and I’m determined to make the systemic changes needed to keep children and youth safe, together with our partners.”