The saga of the girl from Granby has officially ended, two and a half years after her death. Her mother-in-law was sentenced last week and she received her sentence on Friday: 13 years in prison, minimum. And her father pleaded guilty on Wednesday.
But we must remember the mechanisms of the system that led to the negligent death of this girl, at the age of 7, at the hands of two incompetent and cruel adults.
And it must be remembered that, in this whole affair, it was the grandmother who was right.
The little one got the wrong ticket to the big lottery of life when she was born in 2011. First bad luck.
Her pregnant mother was hitting her stomach. Intellectually deficient, suffering from serious mental health problems, she will be declared unfit shortly after the birth of her daughter, of whom she will lose custody.
The father ?
The father was of the same breed. He inherited the baby, when the mother lost custody of it. Drug addict, he did not care about the baby, refused to get up at night to feed him: he said that the baby should “learn” that at night, it is made for sleeping …
In short, the little one was born to parents who shouldn’t have children.
It is the mother of the father – the grandmother of the little one – who made a report for negligence to the DPJ against her son. She will inherit custody of the child from 2012, under temporary orders of six months, renewable.
The little one will live with her grandmother from 2012 to 2015.
I am forgetting a fact: after losing custody of his daughter, the father will have another child with the mother. A boy. During pregnancy, the couple will separate, and the mother will form a couple with the father’s brother. The boy will be entrusted to the DPJ at his birth. But the father will succeed in regaining custody of the boy in 2014.
It will be the beginning of the legal battle of the father, of his great seduction made to the DPJ and the judges to regain the little one, who lived with his mother to him. All against a backdrop of intra-family conflict between the father, his mother and his brothers and sisters.
In 2019, I told1 the father’s legal battle to get his daughter back by reading court decisions handed down in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2017. These decisions set the stage for the little girl’s death.
Let me summarize: the father met a woman, the one who will become in the media “the mother-in-law of the girl from Granby”. The judges and the DPJ are impressed by this woman, described as mature and having a positive influence in the life of the father. The father, he impresses the courts: he takes part in parenting workshops and he has stopped taking drugs, a judge marvels for… three weeks.
I’m not making this up: A judge thought that quitting dope for three weeks was an encouraging sign of parental maturity.
What never made it to the courts was that the stepmother was as cabochonne as her boyfriend. The two were fighting, she kicked him out, throwing his things outside, the police intervened at their house, more dope, more alcohol …
But the father will still obtain custody of his daughter at the end of 2015. There will be an appeal from the grandmother, who will lose all access to her granddaughter.
And by order of the Court, the little one will leave her grandmother’s home in 2016 to go live with her father, she who had essentially never lived with him.
And in 2017, the police will accuse the mother-in-law – this woman so mature in the eyes of Justice – of assaulting the little one. It was the child who went to a convenience store herself to ask for help. The mother-in-law pleaded guilty.
And the father, so transformed in the eyes of Justice, will of course not cut the ties with his “formidable” spouse, even after she has abused his daughter.
We now know the story of the little one from Granby, but in reverse. We know it by the end. By his death.
I repeat what I wrote in 2019: the judges, the DPJ, at the heart of the father’s legal guerrilla warfare, do not know how the story ends. They make judgments in real time. I do not excuse them, I explain.
I read the decisions of the courts and I find that individuals – interveners, judges – have very badly evaluated the individuals who were fighting for custody of the girl, that is to say the father and her mother.
I summarize the system’s analysis grid: the father, for having found himself a presentable blonde, for having attended parenting workshops and for having stopped consuming for three weeks, began to receive grades of 10 out of 10 in its bulletin, in the eyes of the DPJ and the judges on file.
The grandmother panicked. She knew her son. She knew he was a bastard, a manipulator. So she blackened it. She put on too much. And there, for the DPJ and for the judges, the grandmother has become a heretic. I quote from a court decision: “Noting the paternal grandmother’s allegations, [l’intervenante] is about a woman with a broken alarm system, who sees dangers everywhere. ”
Dangers everywhere… You speak.
So, yes, humans have made errors of judgment. Interveners, judges were fooled by two scoundrels. Nobody is perfect.
My bug is elsewhere, in this saga. I come back to the system. I come back to a sentence written earlier in this column: “The little one will live with her grandmother from 2012 to 2015.”
The little one will live with her grandmother from 2012 to 2015. And she was happy there. Well fed, well supervised. She wasn’t running away in the neighborhood. She had a bed in her room. Nobody tied the little one up with slap.
She had no behavior problem.
She went to daycare, had friends there.
She was loved.
Undoubtedly guided by the Youth Protection Act, which asserts the primacy of blood ties, the humans in the system decided that taking a child out of the cocoon where she had been loved for three years and handing her over to a father she did not know other than through supervised visits … it was a good idea.
It’s the little one’s second bad luck: this shitty system that doesn’t understand that giving unfit parents endless opportunities messes up children’s attachment capacity …
This second bad luck killed the little one.
I still believe it was the system that killed her. But still, I hope that some individuals must have taken sleeping pills since his death …
I am thinking of one judge in particular. The one who put an end to the grandmother’s visitation rights in 2017, the one who said these words with carabine arrogance: “Imposing visits with the grandparents could upset the balance of this new family unit and the Court decided to invest in it, it is not in the interests of the child to weaken it. The Court considers that there is a risk, in the long or medium term, that the child will be exposed to a conflict of loyalty, which could compromise his bond of attachment with his father. ”
Ah, that, Your Honor, there is no doubt: he tied her, the father, worse solid apart from that!
But for the “best interests of the child”, you will come back.
Nobody thought of the interest of the little one, of the violence to tear a child from an environment where she had flourished for three years … Nobody except two lawyers (that of the little one and that of the mother of the small) who both asked the essential question, the vital question: why are we going to uproot her, already, if she is well?
And the grandmother, of course. It was she, the grandmother, who was right. From A to Z.
The father and the mother-in-law will go to prison.
The system is being reformed. The Laurent commission recommends replacing the primacy of the parent-child bond to put the best interests of the child above all consideration2, in the law …
It’s crazy, when you think about it: it took the death of a 7-year-old child to understand this evidence.