THE NAZIS AND THEIR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
Anyone
wishing to understand the nature of evils can do no better than to watch the
video posted in this timeline. The Minister of children and Family Services and
workers of the societies are vile collection of criminals, thugs, misfits,
sadists, and petty bureaucrats bound together only by their philosophy of hate
and their love to commit heinous crimes. The stronger are their crimes their
stranglehold on power, the more monstrous their crimes. This tragic story reveled
by a mother and grandmother can established
the principle that the Minister of Children and Family Services and the workers from the Children Protection
Services, are responsible and accountable for crimes against humanity under international law.
WARBURG — In the black hours after
midnight, Jamie Sullivan sat in the lobby of the University of Alberta Hospital
and waited to visit her four-month-old daughter in the morgue.
She knew Delonna was dead. The young
RCMP officer had taken off his hat, pressed it to his chest, and told her so.
Twice, because it didn’t sink in the first time.
She had flipped the kitchen table,
knocked the pictures off the walls and shoved him again and again in a blind,
sobbing rage. The hour-long drive to the hospital from her Warburg farmhouse
was a blur.
It was April 12, 2011, and Delonna
had been in foster care for just six days. She was a full-term baby, and she
was healthy. While Sullivan waited at the hospital, she began to imagine there
had been a mistake.
“It couldn’t be true,” she told
herself over and over during the two-hour wait.
“That’s not my baby down there,” she
thought. “That’s not my baby.”
Delonna Victoria Sullivan was born
Nov. 23, 2010, on a cloudy afternoon when the temperature threatened to dip
below zero, but never did.
Marilyn Koren hovered over her first
grandchild while the nurses wiped her and weighed her at six pounds, 15 ounces,
then put the swaddled newborn into her mother’s arms.
In a photo taken at the hospital,
Jamie Sullivan is wearing a blue gown, her cheeks flushed, holding up her pink,
sleeping baby for the camera. She is beaming
THE NAZIS AND THEIR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
The new family of two made their
home in an old farmhouse outside Warburg, a blink-and-you-miss-it village
surrounded by canola fields and pumpjacks rocking endlessly under the vast
prairie sky.
The peeling linoleum revealed the
creaking floorboards and the water-stained walls tipped in, but the rent was
$600 a month, split with a roommate, and Sullivan was living on income support;
her job driving truck was long gone, as was Delonna’s father.
Koren had been lucky at a garage
sale, and found everything her granddaughter would need, including a crib, a
playpen, and enough clothes for the next three years.
Sullivan made a sanctuary for them
in her bedroom; the rest of the house was crowded with her roommate and her
three children — a toddler and two teens. They were an ad hoc but happy family.
Four months after she brought
Delonna home, Sullivan had a routine argument with her roommate’s 16-year-old
daughter, and told her to take a walk. The girl hiked eight kilometres to town
and moved in with a friend’s family. After a few weeks, the friend’s parents
called Human Services and asked for money to pay the girl’s keep. The call
triggered a visit from child welfare workers.
“One of my biggest regrets is,
knowing they were coming, why didn’t I load up my truck and my daughter and
go?” Sullivan says, trailing off.
On Tuesday, April 5, 2011, the
authorities drove up to the white farmhouse. Sullivan was stunned when her
roommate surrendered her three children without a fight. She took Delonna into
her own room and wept.
“The next thing I know I’ve got the
cop knocking on my door saying I have to give them my baby, too,” Sullivan
says. “I said ‘Excuse me? … I’m not giving you my child. There’s no way.’
“But they told me ‘You can do this
the easy way, or you can do it the hard way.’ And the hard way is they were
going to handcuff me and drag me off to the police station.”
The child welfare workers had no
apprehension order for Delonna, Sullivan says, and wouldn’t say why they were
taking her. They took pictures of the house and accused Sullivan of hiding
marijuana plants, which she denied.
She was consumed with panic.
.
THE NAZIS AND THEIR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY
“I’m supposed to be able to protect
my baby,” she says. “Then I’m thinking, well, how am I going to be able to get
my daughter back if I’m getting arrested? It’s just going to make things worse,
isn’t it?
“I didn’t know what to do besides
try to go with them to the office and get the whole big cruel joke dealt with,
this big misunderstanding. It wasn’t real to me. It wasn’t real.”
Sullivan said caseworkers didn’t have
a car seat for a four-month-old baby, so she insisted they take hers. At the
Child and Family Services office in Leduc, they told Sullivan she had an
alcohol addiction and that she’d have to attend a treatment program and arrange
a home inspection.
Sullivan denied any addiction, but
seeing no other option, she called and made an appointment for the next day.
When it came time to leave, she
cried so hard the caseworker wouldn’t let her hold Delonna while she said
goodbye.
On Friday, three days later, Sullivan
and Koren went to court and learned they would have a one-hour visit with
Delonna that afternoon.
When she arrived, Sullivan rushed to
her daughter and held her close.
She says she immediately knew the
baby was sick. Delonna was lethargic, had severe diarrhea, and an angry diaper
rash. She had a scratch on her ear and red marks on her head.
Sullivan and Koren asked the foster
mother and the caseworker to take Delonna to see a doctor.
They never did.
On Monday, three days later,
Delonna’s foster mother put her down for a nap at 10:30 a.m.
Medical records show she heard the
baby at 2 p.m., and went to check on her at 3:30 p.m., five hours after she had
put her down.
Delonna was cold and blue.
The 911 call came in at 3:43 p.m.
Paramedics arrived nine minutes later and found the baby on the kitchen
counter, the foster mother doing CPR.
Their working diagnosis was
asphyxiation. They scooped up Delonna and continued CPR in the ambulance, they
suctioned her airway, tried a defibrillator. Nothing worked.
Delonna arrived at the Stollery
Children’s Hospital at 4:04 p.m. Doctors briefly treated her for cardiac
arrest. They pronounced her dead at 4:17 p.m.
Hospital staff prepared two
bereavement kits, which included Delonna’s handprints and footprints. They gave
one to the foster mother. They gave the second to the child welfare workers, to
be delivered to the birth mother.
Sullivan never received it.
Sullivan was the last to learn her
baby was dead.
That day, she had driven to Edmonton
for her addiction treatment program and then drove home, unaware.
She went to bed early, because she
had a 9 a.m. court hearing in the city the next day, and she was hoping to get
her daughter back.
While she was settling in for the
night, RCMP officers were tracking down her mother. They asked Koren to come
with them to tell her daughter what had happened.
Koren crept into her daughter’s
bedroom around 10:30 p.m.
“Jamie, there are some people here
to see you,” Koren said quietly, through sobs.
Sullivan got out of bed and walked
into the living room. She saw her mother’s boyfriend, two victim services
workers, and two RCMP officers.
She remembers the younger one took
his hat off, and pressed it to his chest.
After that, her memory goes dark.
The autopsy was conducted the
following day.
Medical examiner Graeme Dowling
ruled the cause of death was sudden unexpected death in infancy.
He noted Delonna had been left to
sleep in an infant carrier with a loose blanket on top of her, and that it was
covering the lower half of her face when she was found.
“Although there were no findings at
autopsy or in the scene reconstruction to indicate that the infant had its
airway obstructed in any way, the infant’s sleep environment was not completely
safe in that she had been placed to sleep in an infant carrier,” Dowling wrote.
Experts recommend babies sleep on
firm mattresses in bare cribs, a practice that reduces the chance of sudden
unexpected death in infancy.
In Alberta, ministry rules require
that foster babies have their own cribs, and policy requires caseworkers to
warn foster parents of increased SIDS risk created by using blankets. The rules
are silent on babies napping in car seats.
Dowling also found “therapeutic
levels” of acetaminophen and cough syrup in the four-month-old’s blood. In
2008, Health Canada recommended against giving cold and cough medicines to
children under six. In 2011, the Canadian Pediatric Society issued a statement
saying that for children, over-the-counter cold and cough medicine “is not
effective in most cases and is potentially harmful.”
Alberta child welfare policy manual
says only that medication must be “taken appropriately” and under adult
supervision. It provides no further guidelines for foster parents, and does not
distinguish between babies and older children.
“As with any medication for any
child, regardless of age, caregivers are required to follow the medication
instructions,” ministry spokeswoman Kathy Telfer said. “If the cough medicine
is not to be used with children under six, the caregiver would not be allowed
to give it to a baby or toddler.”
The policy also says that medication
use “must be monitored by a primary care physician.” Delonna never saw a doctor.
Telfer did not comment on the
consequences if a foster parent fails to follow the rules.
No charges were laid in connection
with Delonna’s death. A fatality inquiry has been called, but is not yet
scheduled. The internal report detailing the circumstances of Delonna’s death
is five pages long, makes no mention of the medication in her system, and
provides no recommendations to prevent future deaths.
-
Sullivan still doesn’t know why her
daughter was apprehended. She denies any allegations that she was addicted to
drugs or alcohol. She maintains that child protection workers had no
apprehension order and no car seat, and believes Delonna simply got swept up
with her roommate’s children.
She won a court application to lift
the publication on her daughter’s name, in hopes of bringing attention to what
happened.
Human Services declined to comment
on the case, citing privacy and legal concerns.
“This was a very sad situation. When
a child dies suddenly, we all grieve,” Telfer said in an email. “This matter is
currently before the courts, and therefore it would not be appropriate to
comment on or respond to any allegations.”
Sullivan and Koren want to see
someone held accountable for Delonna’s death, and in the absence of criminal
charges, they have launched a $2.5-million lawsuit. It is cold comfort.
“It’s like taking and holding little
baby Delonna up in the air and saying: “What’s she worth? A million?
Two-and-a-half million? Five million? No,” Koren says, spitting out the words.
“Babies are not for sale.”
They served the lawsuit papers
themselves.
One caseworker told them she thinks
about the baby every day. Another looked as though she would cry. A third - the
one who apprehended Delonna and didn’t agree to take her to a doctor — did cry
when Koren thrust the papers in her hand.
Delonna was buried in a pink satin
casket trimmed with white lace and stargazer lilies. Her obituary noted she had
never seen the beauty of a summer day.
When Sullivan thinks about her last
moments with her daughter, it is those black hours after midnight on April 12,
2011.
Sullivan and Koren walked down the
stairs together, past a big sign for the morgue, into a sepulchral sitting
room. Delonna was lying in a bassinet.
Sullivan walked over and picked up
Delonna’s body. She rocked her back and forth, whispering “They did this to
you, they did this to you.”
Sullivan clung to her daughter. “I
died in that room that day,” she says. “There ain’t nothing left in me anymore,
except for want to see these people pay.
“I want to see them in jail, and
that’s not even enough. It will never be enough.”
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