CHILD and Family Services has returned Gage Guimond's three-year-old sister to the Selkirk foster home where she lived happily for a year before the agency decided she and Gage would be better off with blood relatives.
■ It was chaos - then it got worse
■ Fed up, they're out
■ 'She was such a happy girl'
■ A sad history
■ The same old question whenever a child dies
■ Here's what's happening in other places
■ Ottawa slow with funding, Flette says
This is the same home from which Gage, aged two, and his sister were taken in late March when the child welfare agency sent them to live with their paternal grandmother.
Beverly Beardy, the grandmother, protested.
She believed the foster parents were providing a good home and she was simply not ready to care for the young pair. She was right.
Shortly after Gage and his sister (who can't be named because she is still under CFS care) were handed over to Beardy's care, a spot check showed Beardy was out of the house, drinking. Instead of being returned to the Selkirk foster family, the children were given to a maternal great-aunt. Dr. Charles Ferguson, director of the Manitoba Child Protection Centre, said it was a decision made by a rookie social worker.
Six weeks later, Gage was dead.
Shirley Guimond has been charged with manslaughter in his beating death.
Beardy says Gage's body was badly bruised and that many of the marks didn't show up until he was at the funeral home. There were bruises on his groin, his body, his face and his head. She presses her own cheek and neck to demonstrate.
She doesn't think there were any broken bones, just a swelling in his head that couldn't be relieved.
Gage was put on life-support until his family and foster parents could gather at the hospital. The Selkirk couple got there before Beardy. They were accompanied by their three boys, kids who viewed Gage as another sibling.
In the presence of his extended family -- save for his young mother Tasha, who was hysterical and wouldn't enter the room -- the machines were unplugged. The two-year-old died 15 minutes later.
After Gage died, his sister was sent to another foster home. Her grandmother heard stories that the child was out on the street, crying constantly.
The girl was moved again, without the grandmother's knowledge, back to the original Selkirk foster family.
She's once again with people who love her, who have documented her potty training, her likes and dislikes, her nightmares and her sleeping patterns.
The difference this time is that she's living there without her baby brother, taken away, all in the name of helping the children, to a place where he was killed.
Gage and his sister were born to teenage parents. His mother, Natasha Guimond, was 15 when she gave birth to her daughter. The father was 18.
How Guimond and Mike Beardy, Beverly's son, met remains a mystery.
What is known is this:
When she was 14 or 15, Tasha Guimond moved into Beardy's crowded North End house.
The new living arrangement barely warrants a shrug from Beardy who, at 46, has 11 children (ages 27, 25, 24, 23, 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17 and 15) and 12 grandchildren.
"I dunno, she just moved in," says Beardy, sitting at a tiny table in her cramped kitchen. "I got six girls and five boys. It didn't make a difference."
The little girl was lyrically named after the time of day she entered the world. Mike Beardy chose the name. Beverly Beardy was in the delivery room when the baby was born.
Everything went as well as could be expected and the young family returned to Beardy's home.
Quickly enough, Tasha Guimond was pregnant again. Mike Beardy was jailed during part of this pregnancy. His mother thinks it had something to do with break-and-enter.
The couple was fighting a lot and Beardy denied being the father of the second child. Tasha moved out of Beverly Beardy's house and back in with her own mother.
Just 16, she went into labour prematurely.
Gage was born at the Women's Pavilion. Tasha was quickly released but her baby remained in an incubator. He was hospitalized for a month.
His head was misshapen, something that would later concern his foster mother but didn't worry the birth family.
"My granddaughter had the same thing," says Beardy. "Her hair grew out and you can't really tell. She's fine."
Still, the foster mother would find a cranial specialist for Gage.
He didn't live to make that appointment.
Mike Beardy has entered into a relationship with another young woman. He's the father of another toddler. Beverly Beardy says she has no idea where to find Tasha Guimond.
TASHA Guimond moved into her own suite with her newborn and her one-year-old child. She dropped out of school during her first pregnancy. She was 16.
Her apartment was financed by social services under a program called independent living. This allows teenagers under 18 who are part of the child welfare system to get their own places and be supported.
The only catch? They usually have to prove their maturity or have a baby.
Tasha had two.
Beverly Beardy, whose son had accepted paternity, began helping the teenage mother. She'd take the kids during the days and sometimes overnight. Eventually, she says, Tasha asked her to take the kids for good.
She agreed.
"I didn't ask for no money," Beardy says. "I just took them because they were my grandkids."
When Gage was somewhere between six and seven months old, Tasha Guimond signed voluntary placement orders. The children were put into foster care.
The Guimond siblings were placed with the Selkirk family, a couple with children of their own and experience fostering. They loved the pair like their own.
"It took about six months to get him into a healthy, happy, fat baby," says a close friend and neighbour.
The foster parents, save for a brief conversation when they expressed their heartbreak after Gage's death, have not spoken publicly about the Guimond children.
The friend says the family faces a long healing process. They knew they had Gage and his sister temporarily, the friend says, but no one could have expected the tragic outcome of reuniting him with his family.
Beardy has a folder of letters the foster mom sent her. She encouraged Beardy to call her collect to speak to the kids or just to chat. She sent photos of the children. She had questions of her own.
"I could really use your help piecing together a health history for the kids," the foster mom wrote. "The pediatrician asks me questions like 'Was Gage given oxygen in the hospital when he was born?' or 'Have the kids had chicken pox yet?' and I have no answers for him."
The foster mom was trying to provide what so many kids in care lack.
She was building a history for these children.
It seemed Gage and his sister were destined for stability until Child and Family Services stepped in again.
Beverly Beardy says she got a call this spring, telling her that CFS had decided to reunite the children with their birth family.
They picked her as the family member who would care for the kids. She protested.
"(The social worker) kept bugging me. She kept saying they had to be with family," says Beardy. "I knew I wasn't ready to start over. I told her that. She said if I wouldn't take them they'd go on reserve. They'd go to Sagkeeng.
"There was no way. I had to take them. Either way, they were going to take them from (the foster parents). They were taking them no matter what."
She gave in.
CFS, well aware of Beardy's challenges, told her she'd get her grandchildren and be paid for their care if she met certain requirements. She had to attend AA, get a police check, have her home safety-inspected and take parenting classes.
She balked at the last, citing her 11 children as previous experience.
The children were returned to their grandmother on March 28. They came with a five-page letter from the foster mom. She explained everything from the type of formula Gage was on to his potty-training schedule to the importance of not putting the baby to bed with a bottle.
These are plainly the notes of a mother, telling in the small details.
"Gage does feed himself well," she writes, as one would to a babysitter. "He's not great with cutlery, but keep giving him the spoon and he'll get less messy as time goes on. Small pieces of everything make great finger food for him. He'll let you spoon-feed him things like yogurt but will also tackle them on his own."
Later, she offers this advice:
"If I could enroll Gage in any activity at all, I would choose Parent & Child swim classes as he just loves the pools, lakes, any water at all. Child and Family Services may well allow funding for extracurricular activities such as this, just talk to (the social worker) about this."
But there wouldn't be time to work out a swim schedule for Gage.
Six weeks after he was put in the care of Shirley Guimond, he was removed from life-support. His sister was sitting on his hospital bed when the machines were silenced.
Gage's father, Mike, bought a hat so the scars left on his son's forehead by the doctors wouldn't be visible during the open-casket funeral.
There the toddler was: The shock of dark hair he'd had at birth, little brown pants, a T-shirt, brown booties supplied by his foster parents and the small hat, a gift from his absent dad.
Gage was laid to rest next to a blue blanket that had travelled with him from grandmother's house to the foster home and then to the coffin.
The family thought of outfitting him in a suit, says Beardy, but decided to make him look like the little boy he was, the child she remembers as laughing and playful.
His grandmother wonders why he was taken from the foster family, the same home to which her granddaughter has now boomeranged back.
"They loved them both," she says. "The kids were happy there. Anyone could have seen that."
lindor.reynolds@freepress.mb.ca
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