All the evil done to Gage and no one pays price

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Gage Guimond (HANDOUT)

While the law may not be an ass, the compromises reached in its execution often have donkey-like properties.

Let's be clear: Unless deals were made, our courts would overflow and the potentially innocent would rot waiting for their often meagre cases to be heard.

Shirley Guimond, late of Winnipeg and now a resident of Peguis First Nation, is a free woman. She still faces sentencing for failing to provide the necessities of life to two children.

The charge of manslaughter melted like slush on a spring day.

She got a 68-day sentence, doubled to reflect time spent in custody. The manslaughter charge was reduced as a result of plea bargaining it down to failing to provide.

You remember Shirley, don't you?

She's the great-aunt (and, yes, I hear the irony as I type those words) of Gage Guimond and his sister. It was in her woeful care that two-year-old Gage died and his sister, bruised and battered, was returned to a foster family with whom the children had found temporary respite.

That Gage is dead and that he was beaten by Shirley Guimond has never been disputed. Nor did she deny abusing Gage's sister. She pled guilty to assault causing bodily harm.

She didn't admit to killing the two-year-old. The prosecution couldn't prove it either. Gage's short, miserable life ended when he fell down a flight of stairs.

So, Shirley scoots off to Peguis. She still has to face sentencing for her admitted failure to provide the necessities of life. That charge, to be dealt with in January, carries a five-year jail term.

Gage Guimond is dead but no one killed him.

One day he was a toddler who was punched, kicked, slapped and slammed into furniture. The next, he was dead at the bottom of a flight of stairs.

The poor tyke's entire life story is tragic.

His grandmother, Beverly Beardy, had Gage and his then-three-year-old sister forced upon her after CFS removed them from a loving foster home.

The "family reunification" was part of a damn-the-torpedoes drive to deliver First Nations kids to their kin.

Beardy, who has addiction issues and a passel of her own kids, didn't want them. Shirley Guimond, who has a criminal record, didn't want them either. The kids had never met her.

In fact, Shirley made two desperate phones calls to a CFS social worker before Gage died. She knew things were going sideways.

Her calls weren't returned.

When he was taken off life support, Gage was so badly injured a police spokesperson said it was too upsetting to describe his injuries.

His family buried him in a hat to hide the swelling on his head.

So who pays?

Not Shirley Guimond, who played the residential school card as a means of partially explaining why she knocked the stuffing out of two little kids. Not Beverly Beardy, who had the chance to provide haven to her grandchildren but couldn't. Not even Gage's mother, a woman so young and taken with substance abuse her kids were brought into care.

The foster family who once cared for Gage and his sister paid deeply. They loved the children. They have Gage's sister back now. She paid too.

The social worker who didn't return Shirley's phone calls? As far as we can determine, no one was disciplined.

The person who decided to take two children from a terrific foster home and place them with women incapable of caring for a cat?

Again, no discipline that we ever discovered.

An inquiry into Gage's death by the Southern Authority didn't assign any blame. It skipped merrily through the history between aboriginal people and mainstream child welfare authorities.

It made note of how difficult the process of devolution was. It referred to Gage as a "warrior for change" and not a two-year-old boy who died in a home of the agency's choosing.

If anyone accepted responsibility, apologized or vowed to do a better job it was never made public.

What a terrible ending to the tragic life of a toddler. All that evil and no one pays a serious price.

lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition November 12, 2009 A7