ASIRT not recommending charges against police in death of drug user’s baby

Alberta Mounties who arrested a pregnant mother won’t face charges in the death of her newborn baby, with the province’s police watchdog citing her drug use as a factor in its death.

However, investigators considered the detachment’s attitude toward her apathetic and inappropriate.

The woman, unnamed in an Alberta Serious Incident Response Team report released Thursday, was arrested on May 9, 2024, for breaching conditions, obstruction and outstanding warrants from Saskatchewan.

The report said she was brought to the Lloydminster RCMP detachment and booked into cells. It said a prisoner report was drawn up, without detailing her potential pregnancy.

An arresting officer reported that the woman didn’t appear to be pregnant and suspected she was using it as an excuse to avoid arrest. She had lied about her name and date of birth when she spoke with police earlier that day.

Others expressed skepticism about her statement, as well.

“The overall impression was that the (woman), who was an admitted chronic drug user, was somehow deemed less worthy of belief or that she was simply the author of her own misfortune, in terms of the severity of her withdrawal symptoms, due to her drug use,” the report said.

“Where a duty of care is owed to detainees that are often vulnerable and marginalized persons, that kind of jaded, indifferent and unempathetic approach is inappropriate.”

The woman said she was about 36 weeks pregnant to some law enforcement while denying it to others, the report said. She denied ever telling officers she wasn’t pregnant, insisting it was the officers who told her that she wasn’t.

Over the course of her imprisonment, officers and guards were informed about her potential pregnancy, her past withdrawal symptoms that almost led her to miscarry, and her treatment regime in a “poorly executed game of broken telephone” that didn’t notify people who should have known.

The onus to inform people of the potential pregnancy was placed on the woman who was in the “throes” of withdrawal, the report said.

“When she did tell someone that she was pregnant, they either did not believe her or did not take any steps to try to confirm the information through alternate reliable means,” it said.

The watchdog report details how the woman, who confessed to being a daily fentanyl user, tossed a methamphetamine pipe out of her cell the morning after she was arrested and was given methadone, a drug to help with withdrawal symptoms, during her imprisonment.

Her boyfriend had reiterated her need to take it because she had nearly lost the baby the last time she went through withdrawals without it, the report said.

The woman complained several times about a sore stomach. Late one night, she said the pain was “my baby.”

About an hour later, guards said she appeared to be experiencing a seizure. When paramedics arrived and asked if she was pregnant, she denied it.

She was taken to hospital and gave birth, and the baby died three hours later.

The report said it died of cardio-respiratory arrest and it’s not believed that treating the mother earlier could have saved her baby.

It said inadequate growth in the womb, pregnancy-induced hypertension and the mother’s drug use contributed to the death.

A little more than a month later, the woman was found dead in her home. A post-mortem report suggested the death appeared to be unrelated to her time in police custody, the watchdog document said.

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