Province begins review into how a sex offender was allowed to foster teen boy

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This article was published 24/09/2015 (3829 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Manitoba’s family services minister says she’s shocked, disappointed and angry over the handling of a case in which a career criminal was allowed to foster a teenage boy and then sexually abused him.

“I think it is inexcusable what happened,” said Kerri Irvin-Ross, who has launched an internal review into the matter and asked the province’s Children’s Advocate to conduct her own investigation.

Irvin-Ross said in an interview Thursday she only learned of the matter the previous day.

On Wednesday, a senior Manitoba judge lambasted Child and Family Services over its handling of the case as he sentenced a 33-year-old man to 13 years in prison for a series of attacks on four boys, including one who was put in his care in 2011 with the blessing of CFS.

Judge Murray Thompson said CFS’s involvement in sanctioning and approving the private placement of the teen with a single adult male raised “serious concerns” that the agency did not follow proper protocols. The judge also noted that a simple record check would have revealed that the accused had a “three-page criminal record check spanning 15 years for violent offences,” not to mention a history of substance abuse. He urged a sweeping investigation into the case.

 

More: Judge puts CFS actions on trial

 

Children’s advocate Darlene MacDonald said she did not wait for a request from Irvin-Ross before initiating a review.

“When I read it in the paper this morning I immediately opened it for an investigation,” she said of Thursday’s Free Press story.

“We’ll be opening it to make sure it’s fully investigated to determine what happened and hopefully put some measures in place.”

MacDonald said she is especially concerned that a record check was not conducted before the teenage boy was placed with a friend of the family.

“In any placement of a child, the criminal record check and the abuse registry check are paramount,” she said.

Progressive Conservative Leader Brian Pallister said the case represents “a sad continuation” of tragic events linked to the government’s management of CFS.

“It saddens me, and it should sadden all of us, that there is such continuing evidence of mishandling and mismanagement by this government on this file,” he said.

The accused photographed and videotaped some of the abuse and broadcasted it online to other pedophiles, court was told. He can’t be named to protect his victims.

The mother of the boy he fostered said the accused was a family friend. She knew of his criminal past but did not know he was a risk to molest her son, she said in an interview Thursday. She said she had been unable to deal with the boy’s problems at home. He was 14 when he was placed in the accused’s care, she said.

The teen’s mother said her 13-year-old daughter was apprehended by CFS at her school earlier this month. The mom, who had been in care of family services herself as a child, said authorities seized her daughter after she sought psychiatric help. She is fighting to get her back.

“All I was doing is going there for help. I’m back to normal. Everything is fine. My pills are back to normal, and they won’t give me my daughter back,” the mother said.

She said CFS did not contact her brother or other members of her family before seizing her daughter.

“They (CFS) say they’re there to help a family, to keep a family together. No, they’re there to rip them apart,” she said bitterly.

Meanwhile, the criminal trial revealed that concerns were raised by family members as early as January 2012 that the accused and the teen were in a “possibly inappropriate living arrangement and relationship.” The man’s crimes came to light in 2013 while he was behind bars on an unrelated matter. While locked up he wrote a series of explicit letters to his foster son, who had returned to living with his mother. She discovered the letters.

Rachel Morgan, a government spokeswoman, said Thursday that the teen had never been in the care of family services, but his family had received services from CFS.

The Family Services Department’s protection branch confirmed on Wednesday that it had a connection to the case, Morgan said. “The question of what agencies and authorities knew and what communications were or should have been made is part of the investigation the protection branch has launched,” she said.

Morgan later clarified that the department began its inquiries immediately after the case first became public on Sept. 2.

larry.kusch@freepress.mb.ca