Life had not been kind to either child in the foster home: the dimpled boy of 3, or the troubled 14-year-old who was bailed out of custody and delivered there by her case worker.
But it was the girl who crept into the toddler's bedroom and suffocated him with a pillow, less than 24 hours after she had left a youth detention facility, a court in this Southern Ontario city heard yesterday.
Then she wrote two notes, signing her name before tucking them under the little boy's head. One was a confession that said "the police can do what they want with me . . . I don't care." The other revealed her victim's last word: "Momma."
Wearing jeans and a purple V-necked shirt yesterday, the dark-haired teen, now 15, doubled over and cried when those details, from an agreed statement of facts, were read out in court. She had been charged with first-degree murder in the Dec. 14, 2005, killing, but pleaded guilty yesterday to a lesser charge of second-degree murder.
By law, information that would reveal her identity cannot be published, including the name of her victim.
Also weeping was the toddler's 24-year-old mother, who said her anger is focused not so much on her son's killer, but on the government agency that failed to protect him: Family and Children's Services Niagara.
"What are they doing to ensure that it won't happen again?" said the woman, whose dark brown eyes once matched her son's.
Her family has requested an inquest into the death, and the Office of the Ontario Coroner has been investigating the case for more than a year.
"There are many other [non-legal]issues with the circumstances that led up to this happening," deputy chief coroner Dr. Jim Cairns said yesterday in a telephone interview. He expects to make an announcement regarding a possible inquest this week.
The lawyer for the family of the slain toddler, Tara Pollitt, said the family has many questions for Family and Children's Services Niagara, a provincially funded child-protection agency.
"The main concern really, is why was this child put in there? Was the girl dangerous? Did they know anything about her before they put her in there? It's not a very usual situation that you put a kid in with a three-year-old and all of a sudden the three-year-old ends up dead," she said.
Bill Charron, the agency's executive director, said case workers knew the girl had a troubled history, but when a Crown ward leaves police custody, there are two options: a group home or foster care.
"We make every placement based on what we know about the child and what we know about the caregiver," he said. "If anyone would have foreseen this, then we would have done everything to prevent it. . . . I've never seen anything like this."
Court heard that the girl has been a ward of Family and Children's Services Niagara since infancy. By 2, she had been adopted, along with her two siblings. But she was removed from the home because she assaulted her younger sister.
She bounced to a foster home in Niagara Falls where, at about 13, she began having a sexual relationship with a man she met at a library. On Dec. 9, 2005, she was charged with theft over $5,000 after allegedly stealing her foster parents' minivan and trying to visit the man at a motel.
Five days later, her case worker arranged for her release and delivered her to a new foster home in Welland, Ont., where a brown-eyed, three-year-old boy had been living for about a year.
The teen settled into her second-floor bedroom, across the hall from the boy. Their foster mother checked on both before she went to bed.
Court heard that the foster mother found the dead toddler the next morning. The accused had used her own menstrual blood to draw markings on his cheeks and a cross on his forehead, court heard.
The teen's lawyer, John Lefurgey, said the girl suffers from fetal alcohol effects and may have mental problems. She will undergo an assessment before she is sentenced in April.
She had "a childhood we wouldn't wish on any of our kids," Mr. Lefurgey said.
Crown lawyer Pat Vadacchino is asking for an adult sentence. The teen faces a maximum penalty of seven years in a youth detention facility if sentenced as a youth, and 25 years in jail as an adult.
Meantime, the boy's family continues to visit his grave, which they decorated with balloons on his birthday and a little tree at Christmas.
"He was a perfect little boy. Everyone that met him loved him," his mother said.
She suffers from depression, and said the Haldimand-Norfolk Children's Aid Society took her son when he was 10 months old. Her daughter, now 6, lives with her paternal grandparents, and she has custody of her eight-month-old son, who bears a striking resemblance to his brother.
When the boy died, his maternal grandparents were in the final stages of an application to become his legal guardians. His 45-year-old grandmother had painted his bedroom walls with the alphabet, and bought SpongeBob SquarePants sheets for his bed.
"I go through hell," she said. "I go through a lot of hell. I've never cried so much in my life."