The madam, the teen, and the teen’s angry mom

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/11/2009 (5844 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

I had the chance to spend a lot of time at the courthouse last week and this week.

The drama of the courthouse plays out differently from the cop beat – it’s like comparing a rough-and-tumble sporting event to an impeccably directed play.

The most interesting moment to witness was the mother of a 14-year-old girl who addressed Peggy Doreen Melquist, the 52-year-old woman who accepted money from a runaway CFS kid who was selling her body for crack.

The girl is now dead. A publication ban prohibits the Free Press from publishing any details that would identify her.

The case was plagued with delays since Melquist’s 2006 arrest, including Melquist’s failure to show up for court for over a year and the disappearance of the street-involved young woman who was supposed to testify against her. When the girl died, the case against Melquist took another blow.

This week lawyers submitted a plea bargain meaning Melquist will not do any more time in jail beyond there months already served. She was sentenced to a six-month concurrent sentence for a charge of keeping a common bawdy house and living off the avails of prostitution.

Officers found a bedroom in Melquist’s home littered with used condoms and a filthy comforter. Next to the spare room, the woman’s adult daughter had a normal bedroom.

Anyway, the girl’s mother wasn’t fancily dressed or artfully composed. She had a ski jacket, sneakers and worn expression.

She stormed into the courthouse on a luminous Tuesday morning after reading about the case in the newspaper, and walked up to a random counter to find out where she could confront the unknown woman who’d taken money and crack from her daughter.

Melquist, this woman who gave her troubled daughter a hovel to squat, was a mystery to her. She made her way to the courtroom and asked permission to address Melquist, a gesture the judge allowed.

Her words were raw. Her delivery was unscripted.

“I hope they give you the maximum time that you deserve,” she said. “I want (Melquist) to go to jail.”

Melquist did not turn her head to look at her. Her lips moved slightly, and I wouldn’t speculate on what her expression meant.

The mother wasn’t particularly eloquent (she dropped the f-word in front of Queen’s Bench Judge Robert Dewar when she called Melquist “f—ing low.” To Dewar’s credit, he didn’t bat an eye.)

But she wore her anger in a way that was so unvarnished, so stark, her meaning was clear. Her daughter wasn’t perfect – she started using cocaine at age 11 – but the woman wanted to get a word in.

“She was loved,” she said, of her daughter. It was a word that hadn’t been used, to my memory, in the hearings until she uttered it.

Before Dewar finished reading his sentence of no jail time, the mother stormed out with a warning for Melquist.

“I’ll see you again, lady,” she said. The brand of justice offered to her by the courts system was not enough.

I received this letter after the stories ran and it gave me pause for thought:

I’ve followed this story intermittently, and am appalled that this woman is likely going to receive such an insufficient sentence for her part in abusing a vulnerable child and, perhaps at least indirectly, contributing to the life circumstances which led to her death. […] 

‘This story brings up a question I had several months ago when this child died. When a child dies in the "care" of CFS, shouldn’t there be an inquest?

We’ve heard in the past about the very young children who have died in care under tragic circumstances, and the results of the investigations have been reported in detail. Because [edited: the victim] was 17 at the time of her death, I worry that she’ll be treated as an adult.