Mother whose son died in group home testifies about workers’ lack of response as she searched for him

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A coroner’s inquest examining the suicide of a Cree teen in a group home, and the failure of the home’s operators to find his body, began with the boy’s distraught mother explaining how she desperately tried to find her son during the four days he was declared missing.

Samantha Chalifoux gripped an eagle feather and braided sweetgrass as she told the inquest’s opening day that – on multiple days – she banged on the front door of the Abbotsford, B.C., home and called its landline, but no one answered. Her son Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s body was eventually found in a closet of his tiny bedroom.

“How is it that my son goes missing for four days in their care when they’re supposed to be there to support and care for him?” Ms. Chalifoux asked.

The presiding coroner assured her this question was central to the efforts of the inquest, which was called this spring following a Globe and Mail investigation into the 17-year-old’s care and death in September, 2020. The investigation found that staff at the home were alleged to have been verbally abusive and neglectful. The five jurors are scheduled to hear from witnesses over the next seven weekdays before determining when and how he died, and making recommendations for systemic changes that could prevent other foster children from dying in similar circumstances.

When the inquest was called, Ms. Chalifoux told The Globe she still hasn’t received answers to basic questions about her son’s death from either the Ministry of Child and Family Development or Xyolhemeylh, the Indigenous child welfare agency charged with Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s care. She doesn’t know when her son was last seen alive, who last saw him, whether care workers searched for him, or whether anyone was in the home with him when he died.

His death also led the provincial government to overhaul its child welfare system to ensure First Nations are able to assume complete control over the care of their children, becoming the first province in Canada to legally recognize this right. The amended legislation also included a provision for a new Indigenous child welfare director position in the province; the role will have as a goal reducing the number of Indigenous children and youth in care.

On Monday, Ms. Chalifoux, who is a member of the Driftpile Cree Nation, from the southern shores of Lesser Slave Lake in northern Alberta, described how Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux was apprehended by the B.C. ministry after his birth and then lived with various other family members in the suburbs east of Vancouver before being taken into foster care at 11.

Ms. Chalifoux described how she had been reconnecting with her son in the years leading up to his death and how – after he was once declared missing at 14 – she found him living and partying at a house in Mission, B.C., with other unsupervised teens, and where a girl as young as 10 was hanging around.

In February, 2019, he came to live with his mother at her apartment in Mission, but she kicked him out, in part, because he kept smoking cannabis at her place, she told the inquest.

She said she called his social worker with Xyolhemeylh (pronounced yoth-meeth), one of 24 Indigenous Child and Family Services agencies charged with providing foster care to First Nations, Métis and Inuit children and youth in British Columbia, and she had him placed in a local group home operated by Rees Family Services Inc., which runs 10 Fraser Valley group homes.

“It seemed okay there at the very beginning, but as the days and weeks started passing by, I started getting the phone calls,” Ms. Chalifoux told the jurors and a handful of lawyers representing the provincial government, Xyolhemeylh, Rees Family Services and the local police force that investigated his missing persons case.

In the first call, Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux said the staff at the home had kicked him out into the cold because they wanted to go get coffee. The next time, she said, she brought him McDonald’s food after he complained he wasn’t allowed to eat anything, and a staff member at the group home told her “he has to wait till suppertime.”

Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s former crisis counsellor Rubina Dhaliwhal, a registered social worker with the Fraser Health Authority’s youth crisis team, then told the inquest he was referred to her in 2017 when the counsellor at his middle school said he had tried and failed to kill himself in a nearby forest. She told the inquest he had a fetal alcohol spectrum disorder and was physically and sexually abused as a young child.

He also still had thoughts of suicide and of hurting others, but no plans to act on those when she saw him as a patient, she said. A plan was put in place to supervise him at school and at home, she said, adding he also was hearing voices and battling anxiety and a general malaise.

Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux’s former family doctor also testified briefly Monday, noting he saw the teen in 2018 when an uncle was concerned with his picky eating. In 2019, after the teen moved into the group home, the doctor came back in and prescribed him a low dose of the antidepressant sertraline, which he said was modified weeks later after a psychiatrist saw the teen.