The Child, Abandoned

"I think ... he would have suffered greatly."
"I've never seen anything like this."
"For me it was a unique case."
"I hope there will never be another one." 
Dr. Gregory Wilson, pathologist, Toronto Sick Children's Hospital

Jeffery Baldwin (second from right) is shown in a coroner's inquest photo. A Toronto woman and her husband who starved their five-year-old grandson to death had subjected two of the woman's children to "eerily similar" abuse more than two decades earlier, an inquest heard Wednesday. Photo: The Canadian Press/HO

 It does happen in some families. That among siblings one child will be ignored, its needs unmet, the child viewed as different and less entitled to affection and support, care and direction. It does happen and then often that child grows to adulthood, understanding what happened to him but not why, and living his own very special life of rejection and pain, feeling a sense of lack of value, finding it difficult to fit in anywhere, doubting that anyone might ever care about his well-being.

That won't happen to Jeffery Baldwin. It's true that he was set aside from the other children who lived in the house where six adults and four other children lived. Not counting Jeffery and his older sister. It was Jeffery and his older sister who were given very special treatment. The other children appear to have lived what might be construed under the circumstances as 'normal' lives.

Jeffery and his sister were confined to an unheated room where they were kept securely locked in. They slept on two urine-soaked mattresses. And they were fed in a bowl set on the floor.

They weren't exactly fed as children might be expected to be, with full attention to their nutritional needs. They were, in fact, starved. Jeffery was almost six, his sister two years older, and she was permitted to attend school. As a starving child she ate ravenously when the children in her school were served snacks.

Those snacks maintained her at a minimal rate of nourishment where she hovered between life and death. For Jeffery there were no snacks, he just perished of disease brought on by starvation.

The haunting question lingers in one's mind. It is known that the local children's aid societies failed in their professional duty to ensure that these children whose records rested with them, were kept in good health. But what about the school that Jeffery's sister attended? Could it not be seen that the little girl was in dire distress? It had been noted how she scarfed the food available there. No one intervened to enquire about anything.

At age almost-six, Jeffery weighed what a one-year-old infant would, 21 pounds. At the Ontario coroner's inquest now ongoing in Toronto, photographs of his autopsy showed him to be physically stunted and horribly emaciated. His limbs resembled mere sticks, every rib could be separately traced.

His small body was covered in ulcers, bruises and abrasions with a scaly rash on part of his body. Four of the five lobes of his lungs wee covered with bacterial pneumonia, his lungs full of fecal flora representing a condition of  dangerous dimensions where "bacteria from his bowel were growing in large quantities in his lungs."

In the house where the child and his extended family lived were his grandparents who had official custody of Jeffery and his sister. With them lived two daughters of the grandparents and their partners; aunts and 'uncles' to Jeffery and his sister. The four other children in the household were theirs.

As for Jeffery and his sister, no one entered their room. The children were lovingly called "the pigs" and perhaps there's a certain justice then in their being served slops in a bowl on the floor, but never enough to sustain life.

"He died", said Dr. Wilson, "when he went from pneumonia to septic shock"; the underlying cause of death being "starvation, pure and simple."

The sad death of a child; the sadder life of that child.
 Photo of Jeffrey Baldwin at the time of his death from evidence provided by the coroner. The inquest into the murder of Jeffrey Baldwin, whose grandparents beat and starved him to death began Monday, September 9, 2013. Jeffrey weighed less than 10 kilograms and was emaciated when he died of starvation in November 2002.