Ottawa Sun
He was a bad kid with a bad attitude, a court heard Monday — a defiant, prickly preteen who drove insane the parents accused of torturing him.
“You know in your heart your father tried everything he could but nothing worked,” the father’s defence lawyer, Robert Carew, told the now-13-year-old boy.
It was the teen’s fourth day on the witness stand but his first under cross-examination.
In his earlier evidence to the court, the boy had gone well beyond the six-month window of torture and starvation outlined on the charges against his Mountie father and civil servant step-mother — who were arrested in February 2013 — to testify about years of deprivation and abuse.
The summer of 2012 and a family trip to Florida had featured prominently.
The boy had alleged he was allowed out to the beach but once. The rest of the time, he said, he was left bound in the holiday home, soiling himself because he could not get free to use the bathroom.
But Carew produced a number of holiday snapshots showing, for instance, the kid grinning in the cockpit of a fighter plane at the Pensacola air base.
In another shot — wearing different and clean clothes — he’s holding a bottle of Gatorade. And still other photos showed him in two different restaurants, again wearing different clothes.
“Are you saying you were faking your smile?” Carew asked.
“Somewhat,” the boy said. “Yes, I was having a good time. I hadn’t had a kind of family time for a long time. I took advantage of the situation.”
Carew brought up the Gatorade picture.
“You’re not tied up in your room being starved,” Carew noted.
“Sometimes (my dad) would have ‘mercy’ on me,” said the kid, miming airquotes.
“That picture speaks 1,000 words,” Carew said. “You’re having a good time.”
“He didn’t want to look bad in front of the public,” the boy replied.
Carew also produced a document written by the boy for his adoption proceeding in 2011. (The boy’s birth mother had died and his step-mother then formally adopted him.) The document was a letter to the family court outlining the boy’s loathing for his maternal grandparents — whom he now professes to have always loved.
“You knew that was going to court,” Carew said.
“I was lying then,” the boy said.
Carew then confronted the boy with bad behaviour that has persisted beyond his parents’ arrest.
The foster parent who took him in in March 2013 described him as “scary” and “intimidating” and said he was prone to “drastic reactions (that) can carry on for hours.”
“You’re pretty defiant, wouldn’t you say?” Carew said to the boy, who agreed.
“You really made it difficult for your parents because you never listened to anything.”
The cross-examination continues Tuesday.