19-Year-Old Canadian Foster Child Dies of Drug Overdose

“A young girl who lived a chaotic life in and out of government care died on Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside of a drug overdose at the age of 19, just 11 months after she aged out of foster care, a troubling report by children’s representative shows.

As a Vancouver Sun story by reporter Lori Culbert shows, Paige, an Aboriginal girl, was treated “with professional indifference,” from the start of her life with an unstable, addicted mother to her death. B.C.’s children’s representative calls it “one of the most troubling investigations” it has ever done in the report, Paige’s Story: Abuse, Indifference and a Young Life Discarded.

Paige, her mother and grandmother all died of drug overdoses. Paige moved at least 90 times in her life, going into and out of care, moving back with her mother, living with relatives, and sometimes living in homeless shelters or detox centres. She changed schools 16 times and only made it to Grade 10.

While Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond’s report is scathing in its criticism of the treatment Paige received from front-line social workers during her time in care, it also tells a horror story of Paige’s 19th birthday.

Although Paige had briefly found some stability in a foster home for four months leading up to her 19th birthday, the transition to independence was “rushed and cursory” and Paige was “virtually ignored.”

Paige was cut off foster care on her 19th birthday in May 2012, her possessions were packed in garbage bags and she was driven to an apartment in a building for Vancouver-area youth at risk. Within a year, she was dead.

As The Vancouver Sun found in its series, From Care to Where, when children in care are cut off at 19, they face high rates of homelessness, unemployment, poverty, substance abuse and incarceration as most struggle to navigate the complicated adult welfare system.

Last year, Turpel-Lafond released another report recommending that a Youth Secretariat position be established, with the goal of establishing minimum income support and access to health, dental and vision care for all former youth in care until age 25.

Paige’s foster parent says Paige “definitely was not ready” to live independently on her 19th birthday and that she was “very anxious” about turning 19.

“When asked whether she thought it would have been beneficial for Paige to remain in foster care beyond her 19th birthday, the foster parent said ‘yes, absolutely,’ and noted that she would have been willing to continue to provide a home and ongoing support for her if such an option had been possible,” the report says.

But Paige’s resource worker was strict about the 19th birthday service withdrawal, and “‘kept saying, OK, you know, this youth is done, this is finished you know, this is the cut-off day,’” the foster parent says in the report.

Despite Paige’s increasing anxiety, including night terrors, as she approached her 19th birthday, she was not seen by a therapist or psychiatrist, although she said she was receptive to treatment, the report says.

When Paige turned 19 and moved, no social worker checked out her new apartment, the report says. The social worker said he was not aware of a ministry practice requiring a worker to observe the living circumstance of a child leaving care and that he would not have been able to visit the apartment because the move happened the day after her 19th birthday, when he was no longer responsible for her file, the report says.

“The child protection system failed utterly to prepare Paige for adulthood and her brief experience of adulthood was self-destructive and fully predictable,” the report says. “The transition process was not a process — it was a passing of responsibility and an indifference to her circumstances.”

Paige had a transition worker to help her prepare for turning 19, but the transition worker said getting Paige independent would be tough because of her drug and alcohol issues and the limitations of what is available for youth.

“‘The ministry and all the youth supports out there are really just trying to — are really just maximizing what’s available to them. There’s so little. Like everyone is just fighting over scraps,’ ” the transition worker said in the report.

“‘[Paige] and so many of the other youth are so relationship-based that it’s just like devastating for them, right? So I can see why [Paige] continued to slip further than she already was, right, because it’s not just housing, but all the supports and everything that go with it.”

Paige didn’t do well after she left care. Her drug use escalated to using crack cocaine and methamphetamine in June 2012 and she was put on psychiatric drugs.

In April 2013, Paige died in the washroom of a supportive housing complex beside Oppenheimer Park.

In a response to the report, Minister of Children and Family Development Stephanie Cadieux said she was “horrified” by Paige’s story and said the outcome is “unacceptable.” She promised changes, including new legislation.

She said Paige’s death was not considered for a case review because legislation only allows the children’s ministry to review deaths of children under 19.

“This is a legislative deficiency that must be changed and it is one we will look to address,” Cadieux said.”

19-year-old former foster child died within a year of leaving care[Vancouver Sun 5/14/15 by Tracy Sherlock]

““If a parent in B.C. had treated their child the way the system treated Paige, we may be having a debate over criminal responsibility.”

This is the most startling — and perverse — conclusion from Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth (RCY), in her 74-page report on the life and death of an aboriginal woman identified only as Paige.

Paige died two years ago from a drug overdose in Vancouver’s poverty-stricken Downtown Eastside (DTES). She was 19. Because she had been involved her entire life with B.C.’s Ministry of Child and Family Development, her death and prior injuries she’d suffered were reported in some detail up the chain of command, and the RCY conducted a post-mortem review.

Paige’s Story: Abuse, Indifference and a Young Life Discarded, released last week, is deeply distressing. Paige led a miserable existence since her birth in Kamloops to young parents who fought. For 19 years, she careened from one bad situation to another, homeless or in flophouses and shelters with her crack-addicted mother, or moving between foster homes and recovery places.

At 16, Paige landed with her mother in the DTES, where she didn’t stand a chance. She drank copiously and was treated for extreme intoxication. A few months before her death, she began injecting heroin. Soon, she was dealing drugs to pay a debt. On April 24, 2013, Paige was found dead inside a “supportive housing complex” washroom, next to a notorious park.

Her demise was not unexpected; Paige was well-known to Vancouver social workers, and they were aware of her and her mother’s histories of substance abuse. According to the Turpel-Lafond report, the state had to save her life, and it did not.

“Her suffering is detailed in this report and it will sicken every reader to know that this happened in Vancouver, under the watchful lens of a social services system that should have done better,” writes Turpel-Lafond.

Of course it could have done better. But here’s another concern: That society could accept Turpel-Lafond’s determination to assign blame for Paige’s death to one source: The state.

The “system” failed Paige, she declares, again and again. “Health care professionals, hospitals, police, outreach workers and staff at shelters and SROs (DTES hotels) repeatedly failed in their duty to report child protection concerns to the ministry,” she writes. “It is time to own the dysfunction and disarray that resulted in a failure to save Paige.”

Missing from this assessment and Turpel-Lafond’s call for ownership are the two people responsible for Paige.

Her father is described in the report as abusive and was, by the time Paige was ten, completely absent from her life. He leaves and that’s that, he’s off the hook.

Meanwhile, Paige’s circumstances, her development, the odds of her finding happiness and good health were constantly upset by her destructive, drug-addicted mother, who insisted on keeping her daughter with her until she tired of the girl, or when felt she could no longer cope. Mother and daughter should have been forced apart, permanently, Turpel-Lafond suggests. Social workers should have made sure of that, and they did not.

The report documents occasions when social workers made what seem like glaring mistakes. Paige and her mother were reunited after mandated removals and separations, even after the mother was known to have “chronic abuse issues” and was “unable to commit to treatment.”

On one occasion, Turpel-Lafond writes, “the stability of (an) emergency foster placement was immediately jeopardized when the mother located the home and began to keep a constant watch on the property. She sat on a park bench facing the foster home and spent hours each day watching the foster home, displaying erratic behaviour and yelling threats to the foster family and her daughter.

“She would lie down on the lawn outside Paige’s window at night and be found sleeping there in the morning. She appeared oblivious to the terrifying effect that her behaviour was having on the other children and family members in the foster home.”

But how does the state force a mother — including one who is drug-addicted, irrational and incapable — to stop mothering or wanting a daughter’s company? Turpel-Lafond recommends stricter adherence to procedures, but she ignores the human instinct.

In 2010, when Paige was 17, her mother was “certified” under B.C.’s mental health act, and confined to hospital. The mother soon “left the hospital against medical advice,” according to Turpel-Lafond’s report. Paige drifted through foster homes until she turned 19, when she was discharged from care. She died almost a year later. Her mother died from an overdose 18 months after that.

“If the system in B.C. had treated a child the way Paige’s parents treated her, we may be having a debate over criminal responsibility,” Turpel-Lafond could have noted in her report. She took the opposite tack. Parents are absolved. The system is fundamental, and so the system is at fault.”

Report on B.C. teen’s overdose death too quick to blame the system and absolve her parents[National Post 5/20/15 by Brian Hutchinson]

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