Tracey turns 19
“You’re wearing my sneakers.” The voice—hard, flat, insistent—is coming from behind us in the line at the A&W in the food court at Scotia Square. I turn to see who it is. She’s a big girl, probably in her late teens, blonde hair pulled back tight against her skull, a belligerent, don’t-fuck-with-me look permanent-markered onto her face. She pays no attention to me.
“I want my sneakers,” she menaces Tracey. “Take ‘em off. Now.”
Tracey doesn’t flinch. She’s half the other girl’s size, almost waif-like, delicate but not really. How could she be, considering? She looks the other girl in the eye. She’s not defiant, but not cowed either. “Heather said I could wear them,” she replies evenly. “Until I get my own.”
Heather, it turns out, is Belligerent Girl’s sister. Heather’s letting Tracey stay in her apartment until Tracey gets her first welfare cheque next week. She also let Tracey borrow her sister’s sneakers because… well, because Tracey’s last boyfriend gave away all her clothes.
That’s another story. There are lots of other stories. We’ve come here today so I can hear a few.
By the time Tracey’s Crispy Chicken Burger combo arrives, Belligerent Girl---seemingly uncertain how to respond to Tracey’s Zen-like calmness---has retreated to a nearby table where she continues to complain loudly about the sneakers to a seatmate.
Despite the fact Tracey has no money for food and probably hasn’t eaten all day, she picks at the meal I buy her. She’s lost 50 pounds in the past two years, she tells me. “I moved from place to place a lot,” she explains. “And I didn’t eat.”
“So,” I ask Tracey, not sure where to begin, “why don’t you tell me what you’ve been up to since the last time we met?”
That was more than two years ago, in the summer of 2007. I was researching a story for The Coast (“Lost Children,” Oct. 25, 2007) about kids who’d fallen through the cracks in the child welfare system. At the time, Tracey was just 16, and a poster child for the gaping abyss that system had become.
Back in 1999, when she was eight, Nova Scotia’s Community Services Department took Tracey away from her mother because---it claimed---it could do a better job raising her.
That shouldn’t have been hard. Tracey’s mother Alison was in foster care herself when she became pregnant for the first time at 15. By the time she was 21, she’d had four children by four fathers. Tracey, her third, was the only one she parented for long. During Tracey’s first few years, they lived in five provinces with more men than Tracey can remember, at least two of whom Tracey witnessed assaulting her mother.
When Tracey was six and living in a Dartmouth welfare hotel with Alison and an ex-husband who wasn’t supposed to be there, social workers scooped her up and placed her in temporary care. Two years later, a judge made the provincial custody order permanent.
But Community Services did no better---perhaps worse---than Tracey’s mother as her “parent.” She was shuffled from foster home to foster home (six or seven by her count), and when those options were exhausted, into one group home after another.
At first, authorities refused to allow Tracey and her mother to see each other. When she was 12, they finally gave Tracey permission to write letters to her mother, but didn’t let her read her mother’s replies---or even tell her she’d written back.
Mother and daughter finally found each other in the winter of 2005---to the chagrin of social workers who got a court order to keep mother and daughter apart, and then threatened to charge Alison with kidnapping after Tracey ran away from her group home to be with her.
That’s when Tracey started acting out. Though she’d never been in legal trouble before, Tracey began racking up criminal charges soon after she was returned to the group home. By the spring of 2007, she was facing 32 criminal charges, all related to her behaviour at the group home.
In court, her lawyer told the judge Tracey needed intense, daily psychiatric treatment on a long-term basis. Since that treatment wasn’t available in Nova Scotia, the lawyer said, the only person “who can do anything” to help Tracey was Judy Streatch, the then-minister of community services and the official legal guardian for all of the 2,000 children in care in Nova Scotia. So the frustrated judge ordered Streatch to personally attend a case conference to discuss how to make sure Tracey got the help everyone agreed she needed.
Demanding a cabinet minister personally come to court to deal with the case of an individual child created the predictable political firestorm; the order was rescinded.
In the end, Tracey eventually pleaded guilty to the charges and was placed on probation until December 2008.
After that… she disappeared again, and—though no one would admit it—the simple truth is that the authorities gave up wanting to find her. She’d become more trouble than she was worth.
At first, Tracey tells me, she moved in with her boyfriend’s family in Spryfield, but “we were fighting too much and the police got called,” so the family told her to leave.
She ended up—briefly—at her mother’s apartment. Her mother kicked her out in the middle of the second night. “We were sharing the pullout couch—her boyfriend was sleeping on the mattress—and she got mad because I was rubbing my feet together. That’s how I get to sleep. But it made her mad.”
Tracey had to walk barefoot back to Spryfield where her now ex-boyfriend’s family let her live in a tent in the backyard. But she wasn’t allowed into the house to shower or wash her clothes. “I had to go downtown for that.”
To make matters worse, she and the ex-boyfriend got into another fight. “There were, like, six police cars and they had police dogs.” The police packed her off to Bryony House, an emergency shelter for abused women and children. Then to Adsum House, which provides housing and support to women and children, as well as young girls over 16 with no place to go.
“It didn’t work out,” Tracey tells me simply.
So she went to Alberta to spend time with a sister she’d never met before. That lasted three weeks. “I got blamed when $1,700 disappeared, but I never took it,” she insists. After that, Tracey made her way to Ottawa to renew acquaintances with the father she hadn’t seen in 10 years.
“It felt weird at first,” she tells me. “He looked way different. I thought he was tall, but he wasn’t. And he’d gained a lot of weight. And lost a lot of hair.”
Still, she recalls those two months with her father with what now seems like nostalgia. “We’d walk the dog together everyday,” she says. “And then in April we went to Weed Day on some hill up in Ottawa. After, we went to one of his friends’ houses and he made us burgers. Then we went home and watched TV.”
But Tracey missed her friends back in Halifax—the street kids who are the only real family she’s ever known—so one day in late June she simply hopped a bus back east. “I left my dad part of my welfare cheque for rent,” she tells me.
Back in Halifax this past summer, another boyfriend gave away all her clothes after she decided to break up with him. Now she spends Monday and Friday afternoons slowly replenishing her wardrobe from the bins at a local shelter. “I’m particular about my clothes,” she tells me.
Today, she’ll need to look for sneakers.
But her main task is to apply for her first adult welfare cheque. In early October, Tracey turned 19, which meant she was finally, officially, free of the child welfare system.
Where was child protection services while she was wandering, unprotected, across the country, I wonder?
Tracey says she met with her social worker a few times a month whenever she was in Halifax, mostly to get her cheque—roughly $150 a month. “We’d have coffee and sometimes she’d drive me to wherever I was staying,” Tracey explains. “And I could call if I needed help.” Her last social worker, a woman named Jackie, “was the best one.”
What’s next? “I’m a woman now,” Tracey says simply. “I have to take care of myself.” But she admits she’s “scared… it’s going to be tough.”
Once she gets her first welfare cheque, she says, she plans to find an apartment, and then apply for a passport and her beginner’s licence, and begin looking for a job.
It won’t be easy. Officially, she dropped out after Grade 9; unofficially, she admits she’s tested at a Grade 5 or 6 reading level. She’s tried alternate school programs but gave up. “I’d rather be with my friends,” she tells me.
Part of the problem is that Tracey can’t concentrate—she never did get the help her lawyer said she needed—which will inevitably become an issue whenever she applies for a job. “I can’t work fulltime.”
It’s hard not to ask yourself whether Tracey, in the end, is any better off for having spent a decade as a ward of the state.
“Do you think you’ve gained anything at all, being in care?” I ask her finally.
She takes a bite of her burger, chews, considers. Finally, she shrugs. “Not really,” she says. “Not really.”
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
The sound of stories not being told…
Russell Walker, Chair of Halifax’s Board of Police Commissioners, isn’t happy with me. It has to do with my comments two weeks back about his lack of comment on the city’s startling number of unsolved murders. I’ll save the specifics of Walker’s complaints for another column.
Today I want to talk about something Walker said, almost in passing, as he criticized the fact I’d written about the board without having sat through one of its (often brief) meetings.
“Nobody covers us anymore,” he lamented.
It’s true. There was a time when reporters from both daily newspapers routinely showed up for its meetings. But then the Daily News folded and, this spring, the Chronicle Herald eliminated 25 per cent of its newsroom staff, including one of two city hall reporters. Now no reporters cover a board that is supposed to provide civilian oversight of our police force.
What is the sound of stories not being told?
While it won’t rank up there with the election of our first NDP government, or Tiger Woods Master’s Tournament of Transgressions, my candidate for the most important story of the year—the decade, in fact—is the continuing implosion of the traditional newspaper in large and small cities across North America. Including Halifax.
I know, I know. I’m self interested. I’m a journalist. I teach journalism.
But I’m also a citizen. And I worry about the consequences of not knowing.
There’s a disconnect, of course. We now have far more sources of information than ever before. The web, cell phone video, citizen journalism, free dailies like this one. But do we know as much?
I confess I was among the skeptics when Metro launched following the demise of the Daily News. I happily eat crow. Thanks to an above-and-beyond collection of young journalists, Metro continually punches above its weight among local media. But even those responsible for Metro will acknowledge it was never intended to replace full-meal-deal newspapers like the Daily News. Neither was News Talk Radio. Or even 30 more minutes of underfunded CBC supperhour news.
And that’s the problem. If there’s no media outlet—print or otherwise—whose job it is to report on mundane happenings at the police commission, the school board, or the planning department, how will we know what we don’t know when there’s something we need to?
My hope for the new year is that someone figure it all out. We need journalism.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
NDP’s first six months: very well but….
Nova Scotia’s new New Democratic Party government isn’t so new anymore. A week from tomorrow, it will have been in office six months.
How well has it performed?
At one level, the answer would have to be very well. Darrell Dexter’s government has demonstrated a level of calming, policy-wonkish competence sadly lacking during the chaotic, what-shall-we-pave-today reign of former Tory Premier Rodney MacDonald.
The NDP clearly learned by watching the endless parade of do-as-we-didn’t Tory gaffes. Even when the new government’s ministers momentarily forget themselves—Deputy Premier Frank Corbett’s big-whopper $441.48 restaurant bill comes to mind—they’ve been wise enough to apologize (“I screwed up and it won't happen again”) and move on. Ernie Fage? Compare and contrast. I rest my case.
The government has also made progress in eliminating the most outrageous entitlements—fees for chairing committees that didn’t meet, peddling taxpayer-bought office furniture for personal gain—too many of our elected officials believed they were entitled to.
On the other hand, it must be said that the New Democrats have broken—or will break—every important election promise they made during last spring’s campaign.
Such blatant backsliding would normally lead to howls of voter outrage, but the NDP’s popularity remains high. That’s probably because we, as voters, never expected them to keep those promises. We would have been angrier if they had, especially after this fall’s sobering economic analysis from experts the government hired to get it off the hook it had created for itself.
For me, however, the most troubling blemish on the NDP’s early record is how easily it seems to have slipped into playing Nova Scotia politics-as-usual on appointments and government spending decisions.
The NDP recently used its majority on the all-party human resources committee, for example, to keep MLAs—and the public—from finding out about all candidates being considered for appointments to provincial boards and commissions. While in opposition, the party led the fight to make that process more open and transparent.
And last week the NDP’s Cumberland South riding president and former candidate resigned because he says the government is playing “old-style politics” on the location of a new provincial jail. The Tories had promised two jails—arguably old-style politics too—but the NDP canceled those, and now plans to build just one to save money.
Intriguingly, allnovascotia.com reports Justice Minister Ross Landry’s home riding is the “leading contender” as home to the new institution.
Those are not good omens so early in their tenure.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
Rebuttal to the chief
Tom Martin had it wrong, Halifax Police Chief Frank Beazley told CBC Radio’s Information Morning on December 1.
In my story for The Coast (November 19, 2009) on the city’s striking number of unsolved homicides, I’d quoted Martin, a respected retired homicide detective as saying: “To my knowledge, the cold case unit has not laid one single criminal charge in nine years.”
Not true, replied the chief. “They’ve laid charges in two murder cases,” he told interviewer Bob Murphy. But when Murphy pressed him for details on the outcomes of those cases, Beazley demurred. “I don’t recall,” he said.
Curious, I emailed HRP spokesperson Brian Palmeter to ask which murders the squad had solved.
The two incidents, Palmeter replied, involved “the 1988 murder of Smiley Bailey where Gerald Patrick Dow was charged in 2002, [and] the 2000 murder of Joe Murphy where Christopher Terriak was charged.”
The realities of those cases, however, are considerably more complicated—and less convincing—than the chief suggests.
Terriak was indeed charged with murdering Murphy, a fellow street person, in 2003, three years after the original incident. But the cold case squad appears to have had nothing to do with laying those charges.
Martin says the case “was solved and charges laid while I was still in homicide—by members of the homicide section.”
In 2003, Terriak was arrested for beating up another street person, a man he believed had “ratted him out” for Murphy’s murder. When Rev. Gus Pendleton, a local minister, heard about that beating, he went to police with an audiotape in which Terriak confessed to having killed Murphy three years before. Terriak’s confession to the minister was what got him charged—and convicted.
Hardly a triumph for the cold case squad.
The case of Arnold (Smiley) Bailey is even murkier. Bailey was gunned down on Creighton Street in Halifax’s north end in 1988 in what police believed was a drug-related murder. They initially charged Spryfield drug kingpin Terry Marriott Sr. with the crime.
Gerald Patrick Dow had been supposed to be one of the witnesses for the crown in that case. During Marriott’s 1991 preliminary hearing, in fact, Dow testified he saw Marriott shoot Bailey, and claimed that Marriott had then given him the gun with instructions to give it to Marriott's wife. Despite the fact Dow was granted immunity from prosecution in the case, he was never called to testify during the trial, and Marriott was acquitted in June 1991.
Eleven years later—for reasons that have never been fully disclosed—the crown revoked Dow’s immunity deal and police this time charged Dow himself with first degree murder.
By the time the case actually got to court, that charge had been bounced down to being an accessory to the murder. In the end, Dow pleaded guilty only to hiding the 9 mm handgun used in the crime.
To this day, no one has been convicted of Bailey’s murder — even though the case is no longer listed on the police department’s website among its 48 unsolved murders.
Much else about Beazley’s interview with the CBC, as well as his written response to the Coast article—”Frank Beazley: Setting the Record Straight,” Letters, November 26, 2009)—are equally problematic and incomplete.
While Beazley and Martin claim to respect one another—Beazley described Martin’s career-long contribution to the force as “valuable,” while Martin insists “I respect the chief and my opinion is he is a good chief [who was] given wrong information” for his rebuttals—they clearly see the issues through very different lenses.
Beazley, for example, claims the city’s homicide clearance rate isn’t nearly as bad as Martin portrays it. But when the CBC’s Bob Murphy pointed out that similar-sized cities such as London and Windsor, Ontario, had far fewer unsolved murders than Halifax, Beazley suggested the reason was that many of Halifax’s murders were more difficult to solve because they were “gang related, drug related.”
Martin doesn’t buy that. “Both those cities have very high profile gangs— the Rock Machine and the Hell's Angels,” he notes. “Neither of these gangs have a high profile in Halifax.”
“It is disappointing,” Beazley wrote, “that the [Coast] article brought into question the experience and professionalism of our officers, particularly those in the major crime unit.”
In fact, the focus of the article wasn’t on the experience and professionalism of the officers in the major crime unit themselves—whom Martin also went out of his way to praise—but the lack of murder-investigation experience and decision-making smarts among those, including Deputy Chief Chris McNeil, who directly manage those officers and make the critical decisions that affect the investigators and their investigations.
“The only point I am attempting to make known is Halifax Regional Municipality has too many unsolved homicides,” Martin says today. “The problem is not with the quality of investigators or the types of murders we encounter. The problem is management’s lack of experience in these types of investigations and, until this changes, the numbers of unsolved are only going to increase.”
One of the results of that lack of experience, Martin says, was the decision to shut down a special task force set up to look into the 1999 murder of Jason MacCullough because an informant turned out to be a liar. Beazley told the CBC the decision was made “with the best consultations with the best legal minds, not within the department but with outside people.”
Martin, who argues the task force had developed plenty of other information independent of what the informant had told them and was “very close” to being able to lay charges, says the chief’s claims simply don’t match the timeline. The investigators discovered the informant had lied on a Saturday afternoon; McNeil “shut down the file Monday morning first thing. At no time was there any discussion or explanation that the crown was consulted. It would have been physically impossible for a crown prosecutor to have the time to review the file and make such a decision… The investigation was shut down and the explanation given was because Deputy Chief McNeil said so, and there is no room for discussion. This is what investigators were told.”
Beazley also dismissed two other claims Martin made in the article concerning the Kimberly McAndrew missing persons investigation: that when Martin was a cold case investigator himself, he had been unable to get a copy of the RCMP’s files of its investigation into her disappearance, and that evidence he’d intended to send out for DNA testing in the case had disappeared.
“The simple truth,” wrote Beazley, “is that all exhibits are accounted for and the RCMP file referenced in the story has been in our possession for many years.”
Not so, replies Martin. There was, in fact, more than one RCMP file. Because McAndrew’s father was an RCMP officer, he says, the “RCMP were involved in Kim’s incident before Halifax police were even called. They went to her workplace, spoke to people and even went through her workplace. I was informed by several RCMP members after I was assigned Kim's file that the RCMP had their own file regarding Kim. That is the file I tried to obtain and was unsuccessful.”
As for the DNA evidence, Martin says it wasn’t there when he went looking for it. “I went looking for a certain piece of evidence, [the nature of] which I can not disclose,” he explains. “I was told by all the those that I made requests for this item that they did not have it and they could not locate it. To me that equals missing.”
“What is most disconcerting,” Beazley added in his letter to The Coast, “is the specific information about individual files that was contained in the article. This could very well jeopardize the integrity of those files and open up old wounds for the families involved.”
As for information jeopardizing the integrity of the case files, it’s important to make the point that Martin was very careful not to discuss specific investigative details of any of the cases with me. The detailed information about those cases in the story comes either from my own independent interviews or from previously published reports.
And Beazley’s concern about the story opening up old wounds—“We have reached out to the families in question to assure them that work continues on their loved ones’ cases”—would be more convincing if one of those families hadn’t told me they hadn’t heard from the department for at least five years prior to the publication of the article.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
Weekend book signings
Sunday, Dec 6, 12:00-2:00pm
Author Stephen Kimber will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, IWK: A Century of Caring for Families. Coles, Halifax Shopping Centre.
Sunday, Dec 6, 3:00-5:00pm
Author Stephen Kimber will be signing copies of his books, including his latest, IWK: A Century of Caring for Families. Chapters, Bayer's Lake, Halifax.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
Police Commission… What Police Commission?
Quick now. Can you name the chair of HRM’s Board of Police Commissioners?.... No? OK… Can you at least tell me what the board does?...
Did you even know we had police commissioners?
Perhaps that’s the problem.
According to city bylaw P-100, the board—six members appointed by regional council, one by the province—is supposed to “provide civilian governance” of the force.
How well does it do that job? That’s hard to know. What is easier to say is that the board doesn’t spend a lot of time on its duties. Most of its monthly meetings this year lasted less than an hour. The board considered and approved the force’s 2009-10 budget—$72.8 million—at a meeting that lasted one hour and nine minutes. The most recent posted minutes—for its Sept. 11 meeting—show that commissioners met for 29 minutes.
This entry shows up more than once: “a copy of the HRP reports for [Month] were before the commission. As there were no questions, the board accepted the HRP reports as information.”
In February, Commissioner Gloria McCluskey did ask why a letter “addressed to the board was not brought before the board.” Chairm Russell Walker—the answer to our first question—explained the letter had actually been sent to the province and only copied to the board, so it “was then sent to Chief Beazley for follow up.”
Is there a cozy relationship between the board and the force it’s supposed to manage?
When the grandfather of Jason MacCullough—one of 48 unsolved homicide cases on the books—wrote to the justice minister last year complaining about the lack of progress in that investigation, he copied his letter to the chief and chair of the police commission. Deputy Chief Chris McNeil and Walker did come to see him, he told me, but McNeil did all the talking. “Walker didn’t say a word.”
I recently wrote an article for The Coast asking why Halifax has so many unsolved murders. In it, Tom Martin, one of Halifax’s most experienced and respective detectives, complained the force’s most senior officers lacked on-the-ground experience in criminal investigations. Another recently retired senior officer wrote a letter to the editor supporting Martin’s arguments.
Has the board of police commissioners invited either of them to meet with it to discuss their concerns? I don’t know. I emailed the board’s chair a week ago telling him I wanted to ask some questions about why Halifax has so many unsolved murders. He hasn’t gotten back to me.
Copyright 2009 Stephen Kimber
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, a Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and seven non-fiction books.
Buy his books at Amazon.