Baby born into family torn by abuse

PHOENIX SINCLAIR INQUIRY Enlarge Image

Photographs of Phoenix Sinclair were filed as exhibits in the inquiry into her death at the hands of her mother and stepfather.

When Phoenix Sinclair was born, she emerged into a family torn by a devastating cycle of trauma, addiction and incredible abuse, the inquiry into the Manitoba girl's death heard on Thursday.

Those red flags would set into motion the processes that would spirit Phoenix into a system that sometimes struggled to manage crushing caseloads, social workers said on the inquiry's second day of testimony.

Phoenix eventually fell out of that system and into the violent home of her mother, Samantha Kematch, and stepfather Karl Wesley McKay. Three months after Winnipeg Child and Family Services closed Phoenix's file in 2005, she was killed, after months of horrific abuse.

Kematch and McKay were convicted of first-degree murder and are currently serving life sentences.

But it all began on a spring day in April 2000 when Phoenix was born at Health Sciences Centre. A nurse alerted the hospital's social work office to the birth; Kematch, then 18, seemed ambivalent about parenting her baby, a hospital social worker told the inquiry on Thursday.

The young woman had sought no prenatal care during her pregnancy and owned no baby clothes or crib. Most concerning of all: Kematch revealed to the worker, whose identity is subject to a publication ban, that she had a two-year-old son who was a permanent ward of a child-welfare agency. "They thought I would hurt him," she said.

In the first days of Phoenix's life, the child-welfare system worked as it should. The hospital social worker alerted Winnipeg Child and Family Services to concerns about Phoenix; a CFS after-hours team came out to investigate and decided Phoenix should be apprehended.

Her parents agreed, but the decision to seize Phoenix had already been made.

Intake worker Marnie Saunderson told the inquiry she and Phoenix's biological father, Steve Sinclair, dressed the baby before Saunderson carried her to an agency safe house. Kematch, she wrote in her notes, appeared less interested in the child.

"I thought that was important to note," she said.

"If there continued to be no interest in baby Phoenix, that might be viewed more significantly (by social workers)."

There was more reason to be concerned. After an administrative mistake saw Kematch's own child file transferred to the Winnipeg Child and Family Services intake office, Saunderson learned about a shattered family, twisted by alcoholism and an abusive home; when Kematch was 11, she herself became a permanent ward of the state.

In foster care, Kematch exploded with rage: She dropped out of school and disappeared from care placements to run with street gangs, drink and steal cars. She was hostile toward adults and defied all rules.

When her son was born in 1998, Kematch showed little interest in parenting him.

When Saunderson learned this, CFS had already officially apprehended Phoenix. But just before Saunderson took Phoenix away, Kematch suggested her mother was on her way to pick Phoenix up. Saunderson told her no.

"Having a history of abuse or neglect pretty much cancels out any possibility (of taking a child into care)," she said.

That day, Phoenix was taken to an agency safe house, and from there she went into foster care. But she also entered a system that sometimes groaned under the weight of need; Saunderson spoke of how social workers frequently worked overtime without pay, just to keep workloads at a manageable level.

That stress may have persisted, even after the province added 230 new child-welfare agency positions and invested hundreds of millions of new dollars into the system in the wake of Phoenix's death.

"Workload has been an issue for the 20 years I've been around," Saunderson told the inquiry.

Indeed, the inquiry saw internal CFS emails from 2009, in which Saunderson warned a supervisor CFS's intake workers were at a "critical stage," bowed by heavy workloads and administrative backlogs. That situation improved after a round of new hires shortly thereafter, Saunderson agreed under questioning, but the world in which child-welfare workers move only seemed to worsen.

"I think we've gotten more money and more positions, but I think problems have gotten worse out there in the world," she said. "There's new gangs, new violence concerns, new substances every month that make our job harder. So although I can say there've been improvements, I don't know it's translated into a 100 per cent cure for workloads."

The inquiry into Phoenix Sinclair's death continues on Friday. The first phase of the inquiry, which will trace the chronology of Phoenix's life and decisions made about her care, is expected to last until the end of the year.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca