Alberta man found not guilty in death of 5-year-old foster child left in car for 8 hours

An Alberta foster father has been found not guilty of all the charges he faced in the death of a five-year-old boy in his care.

A publication ban covers the little boy’s name and any information that could identify him. CBC is also not naming the foster parents in the case due to the ban.

Court of King’s Bench Justice Bob Aloneissi acquitted the man Thursday of manslaughter, criminal negligence causing death and failure to provide the necessaries of life.

The boy was found dead in the passenger seat footwell of his foster mother’s vehicle on June 14, 2022, at a rural property south of Edmonton.

He lived with significant physical disabilities that meant he was unable to sit up unassisted, and had very little control over his trunk, limbs or neck.

He was left in the vehicle for more than eight hours after his foster father placed him on the seat that morning. At some point during the day, the boy slid off the seat and suffocated, unable to move his head into a position where he could breathe.

Court heard the man put the boy in the car anticipating that his wife would later drive him and another young child to school, as she usually did.

“As with many intimate partners busy caring for children, many things are left unsaid, assumptions are made. … One partner will go to work and completely depend on the other partner for caring for the children,” Aloneissi said.

“This case turned out to be the exception to that.”

The judge concluded that while the foster father’s decision to leave the boy in the car was “a regrettably wrong error in judgment with tragic consequences,” he was left with reasonable doubt that the man’s actions were criminal.

‘How many things had to go wrong today?’

During the trial, the court heard recordings of several police interviews with the foster father from the day the child died.

The man gave RCMP officers details about how he and his wife had been caring for the boy most of his life, and while he had high needs, “[He] is such a happy little guy. He’s totally non-verbal, but he laughs.”

The man said he believed a series of events that were out of the family’s typical routine added up to disaster.

“It doesn’t even make sense how this could happen,” he told police.

“How many things had to go wrong today for this to happen?”

At the time there were seven children in total in the couple's home, from toddlers to a teenager.

The father told RCMP he usually helped get some of them ready each morning before he left for work.

That included the five-year-old boy, who went to preschool. The man told police that he would typically get the child dressed and changed, then put him in his carseat in his wife’s vehicle.

But on that June morning, the man said he went to the garage to find the carseat missing — his wife had taken it out to clean the truck.

He told police he sat the boy up in the front passenger seat so he could reinstall the carseat when he suddenly realized two older children were about to miss their school bus.

Video played in court shows him reposition the child on the seat once before leaving the garage with the other children in his own vehicle.

Child discovered unresponsive

The foster father told police he texted his wife a few minutes later that the five-year-old was “in the truck” so she could drive him to school.

But he didn’t realize his wife had decided not to make the trip that day. It was raining hard, and the other child she normally drove had been up unusually late the previous night.

“When I go back, I never told her that he wasn’t in his carseat,” the man said in the police interview.

After he returned from work that afternoon, he said he and his wife spoke inside the house for a while before she decided to go to the grocery store, and found the little boy in her vehicle. He’d been there all day while the woman was inside the house looking after other kids.

The man told police that he came to the garage as his wife yelled for him and grabbed the child out of the front seat.

“I’ve never seen anybody that’s deceased, but it’s just that gut feeling — that’s not good.”

The foster mother attempted CPR, but the child was declared dead by paramedics who arrived a few minutes later.

‘The results were tragic’

Aloneissi noted in his decision that it’s “fair to question” where the foster mother thought the young boy was all day while she was home, especially as she looked after the other child who would have normally been taken to school with him.

The judge said he found her reaction to discovering the five-year-old “deplorable, if not shocking,” but she wasn’t the one accused in the case.

The foster father took the stand in his own defence and told the court that when he set the young boy in the car, he tried to replicate the way he often sat up on the couch, putting him in the nook between the seat and the centre console.

He also denied lying to the child’s pediatrician, who testified that the man told her he’d found the boy dead in his bed, not on the floor of a vehicle.

Aloneissi said he had some concerns about some of the man’s responses to questioning in court.

“He attempted to blame child and family services for [the boy’s] death and accepted no blame for his own actions in cross-examination,” the judge said.

But he concluded that the man’s conduct wasn’t definitively proven to be a marked departure of a reasonable parent or caregiver in the same circumstances.

Aloneissi said the boy was well cared for in the home, and the foster parents had a history of advocating for his medical needs and making sure he was integrated into family activities on a daily basis.

On the day in question, the foster father “was not as attentive to his son’s needs and the results were tragic,” the judge said.

“It is important to acknowledge that [the boy’s] death casts a pall over the entire trial.”

The child's death is also set to be examined through a fatality inquiry, which has yet to be scheduled.