A trial is underway for an Alberta foster parent accused in the death of a five-year-old boy who had significant disabilities.
The boy was found dead on the afternoon June 14, 2022, in a garage at a rural property near Leduc, Alta.
He’d been placed in the front seat of an SUV that morning while the man took other children in the home to school. Court heard the boy was non-verbal, and had physical disabilities that meant he couldn’t sit up unassisted or maintain control of his head, neck or trunk.
He stayed there for hours before the couple caring for him found him unresponsive on the floor of the vehicle and called 911. Paramedics declared him dead at the scene, and an autopsy determined that he suffocated.
After an application from Crown prosecutor Dallas Sopko on Monday, there is a publication ban on the boy’s name and any information that could identify him. Due to the ban, CBC News is also not naming the man accused in the case for the time being.
The accused pleaded not guilty on Monday to all three charges he faces: manslaughter, criminal negligence causing death and failure to provide the necessaries of life.
Sopko told the court that the man and woman had been foster parents to the boy for several years, and they understood well the care he required.
Yet the boy was left in a car without an “obviously needed” carseat as the foster father rushed to get other children to school and then go to work, Sopko said. The foster mother is not facing charges in the case.
The man was anticipating that his wife would be driving the boy to school later, and he texted her to tell her that the child was in the car. But court heard she didn’t respond for almost an hour, and was in the house with another child while the SUV stayed parked in the garage all day.
“Inexplicably, [the five-year-old] was left unsupervised, unrestrained in the vehicle for almost eight and a half hours,” Sopko said.
The Crown isn’t alleging that the man intended to injure or kill the child, but that serious injury or death was a foreseeable consequence of his actions.
“The events crystallized the moment he drove away from the residence,” Sopko said.
Security video from inside the garage was played at the judge-alone trial in Wetaskiwin, Alta., on Monday.
It shows the foster father carrying the child to the car and placing him in the passenger seat. He returns once, adjusts the child in the seat, and closes the car door. Two other children then appear and run to climb in another vehicle, and he opens the garage door and drives away with them.
Footage from later in the day shows the foster mother get in the driver’s seat of the car where the boy was placed. As she sits there, she calls for her husband — when he opens the passenger side door and picks up the child, they both begin shouting.
In a recording of the 911 call played in court, the man told the operator that the boy isn’t breathing, and his medical condition means he functions “like a three-month-old.”
Prosecutors plan to present evidence about what the foster father did after the young boy’s death, alleging that the man “intentionally misled” the child’s pediatrician about how he died.
The trial is scheduled to run until Dec. 12.
