Jeffrey’s sister was always hungry, stinking of urine yet teacher claims there was no reason to suspect neglect

Kindergarten teacher Odette Revoredo leaves 900 Bay Street after testifying in the
Jeffrey Baldwin case in Toronto. Revoredo taught Jeffrey Baldwin's older sister.

The Ontario coroner’s jurors who are now examining the death of Jeffrey Baldwin already know it was probably going to school — a couple of terms of kindergarten — that saved his sister’s life.

The little girl was six. Jeffrey was five. Pictures show once, they were as cute as any and all kids are, but the grandparents who had legal custody — Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman, now in prison — inexplicably loathed them.

Bottineau and Kidman kept the two children apart from their siblings in an unheated, locked bedroom and forced them to spend hours in their own waste, without access to bathroom or potty; they starved them; they punished them with inventive cruelty, such as making them stand naked for hours in the bathtub.

Yet for no reason the jurors have heard, the grandparents let the little girl start half-day kindergarten in January of 2002. She went until June and came back in the fall.

(Neither the names of Jeffrey’s siblings nor the Toronto District School Board elementary school they all attended can be used.)

The snacks the little girl got there, pediatric nutritionist Dr. Stanley Zlotkin already has testified, may have spared her. The few hundred extra calories in a carton of milk or juice likely made all the difference.

But Jeffrey was not so lucky.  (more...)

Jeffrey’s sister was always hungry, stinking of urine yet teacher claims there was no reason to suspect neglect