Children’s Aid dismissed sex abuse allegations two years before grandparents killed Jeffrey

A family photo of three-year-old Jeffrey Baldwin

The 45-page chapter that was given this week to the jurors at the Ontario coroner’s inquest now probing the death of Jeffrey Baldwin is a searing indictment of institutional incompetence.

A summary of Catholic Children’s Aid Society of Toronto involvement with the little boy’s family — it dates back to 1950 — the document is filled with ghastly revelations on almost every page.

For the record, Jeffrey died of pneumonia and septic shock on Nov. 30, 2002, at his grandparents’ east-end Toronto home.

He and his three siblings were in the legal custody of their grandparents, Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, who in 2006 were convicted of second-degree murder in Jeffrey’s death and of forcible confinement for the way they regularly locked up in a fetid room the little boy and one of his sisters.

But the underlying cause of Jeffrey’s death was chronic and prolonged starvation; it is that which speaks most poignantly to the years of cruelty and deprivation the once-chubby little boy endured.

The youngsters were transferred over several years to Bottineau’s custody by Ontario’s family courts, but the CCAS was always there in the wings; it had Bottineau’s back and in turn backed her in court.

The story of how Bottineau, who is now 62 and in prison serving a life sentence, morphed from someone who was a known convicted child abuser (she was implicated in the 1969 death of her own first baby) to a woman who was used by the CCAS as a community foster parent and endorsed as a suitable caregiver for Jeffrey and his siblings is a galling one.

At every turn, what could go wrong did.  (more...)

Children’s Aid dismissed sex abuse allegations two years before grandparents killed Jeffrey