B.C. minister promises answers in horrific foster abuse case, apologizes to grandmother

B.C.'s minister of children and family development has offered an apology and agreed to meet with the grieving grandmother of a boy from the Fraser Valley who died in foster care.

The child was beaten, starved, tortured, before he died in 2021.

“This is such a horrific tragedy. We have to understand exactly what we need to do as a ministry to make sure this never happens again,” Mitzi Dean told CTV News.

The emaciated boy was just eleven when he died. It was one of many beatings he and his younger sister, both indigenous, suffered at the hands of their indigenous foster parents who were both sentenced to 10 years in prison for manslaughter and aggravated assault.

No one involved in the case can be identified because of a court-imposed ban.

Last week, the boy’s grandmother demanded an apology from the minister responsible and Thursday she got it.

“If she’s watching this now, I send to her and all the family my deepest apologies and condolences,” Dean said.

“This has been a terrible, terrible tragedy. I can’t imagine the heartbreak that the family and the community have been going through,' she said.

The grandmother said when her son’s boy was put in care, she told the ministry she would take him in. But she was refused. She still doesn’t know why.

Dean has promised to look into it.

The tragic case is one fraught with systemic failures. A social worker had not visited the boy for seven months before his death.

Dean told CTV News it is unacceptable that policies and procedures were not followed. She said changes have been made to ensure compliance by frontline workers.

Dean also said that once the horrors of the foster home were discovered, steps were taken to protect other children in the house as well as foster children supervised by the same ministry team.

“Every single child and youth that was the responsibility of that team was visited, their homes were visited and in every single circumstance there was a reassessment of whether those children were in a good home that was meeting their needs,” she explained.

Two workers involved in the case are no longer with the ministry though it’s not clear if they were fired or resigned.

Meanwhile, the grandmother is just one of many people calling for a public inquiry into what happened.

The minister has so far rejected this. Instead, she believes an independent review launched by B.C.’s Representative for Children and Youth will find the answers needed.

“They have the expertise and experience to do a comprehensive inquiry,” she said.

“If they find that there are issues in the ministry operations that can be immediately fixed and immediately improved, they will tell us. We don’t have to wait until they write a report,” she explained.

After the former foster parents were sentenced in June, the grandmother says she wrote the ministry, but never got a response.

Now Dean has offered to meet with her as work continues to try and fix a system some say is completely broken.

“I understand that everyone wants more answers,” Dean said.