How does someone manage to murder a child inside the headquarters of the children’s aid society?
It’s a question that loomed large over the recent trial of Shardanae Cousins-Emily, the 24-year-old woman who brutally beat a three-year-old boy to death in the washroom of the Toronto children’s aid society on Dec. 2, 2023, and was convicted by a jury this month of second-degree murder.
The criminal trial made public a series of troubling details about how the agency, the organization mandated to protect Toronto’s most vulnerable children, handled the incident — and those facts are now sparking calls for a public inquest.
Cousins-Emily had been looking after Yverson Belotte, Jr. — better known as Quintanni or simply Quinn — for the weekend, helping out Quinn’s mother, Shania John, who was her former foster sister. Cousins-Emily had an appointment for a supervised Saturday visit with her own son at the CAS offices on Isabella Street. She’d recently lost custody of the boy; John knew that Quinn would be tagging along.
Yverson Belotte and Quinn.
At trial, the Crown’s theory was that Cousins-Emily was frustrated over losing access to her son, and took that frustration out on Quinn in the bathroom, leaving the little boy with bleeding in his brain and chest, a bruise across his forehead, his two front teeth knocked out, and cuts and bruises to his ears, arms and hands.
But no flags were raised by staff about why Cousins-Emily showed up for the visit with a child no one had ever seen before.
And then a cleaner wiped up most of the blood in the bathroom before the police knew anything about what happened.
And no one involved with the CAS ever called 911.
Quinn died of blunt-force trauma to the head a day later.
The circumstances of his death cry out for a coroner’s inquest and for the children’s aid society to show accountability, says Quinn’s father, Yverson Belotte, who sat through days of graphic evidence at Cousins-Emily’s trial.
“Children’s aid society: Acknowledge my son. He was a person, a human being on this Earth. Say his name,” Belotte told the Star.
He says he can’t shake the images in his head of his son’s final moments, thinking Quinn must have been confused about what was happening, likely putting his hands up to protect himself.
“As a father, I’m always going to live with that,” Belotte said. “That I wasn’t there to protect him.”
Belotte is suing the Children’s Aid Society of Toronto, Cousins-Emily, John, and the security guard who dealt with Cousins-Emily for $1 million each, with further damages to be determined. Among other things, his lawsuit alleges that the CAS “neglected to adequately ensure the safety” of his son and failed to properly investigate the incident.
No statements of defence have yet been filed.
The Toronto children’s aid society sent a one-sentence response to the Star’s list of questions regarding its handling of the incident: “We will not be providing comment as this matter is subject to ongoing legal proceedings.”
Yverson Belotte Jr., better known as Quintanni or simply Quinn.
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The murder of a ‘perfect child’
The fact that a child was murdered at the children’s aid society’s offices is a “metaphor” for how broken the child protection system is in Ontario, said former provincial child and youth advocate Irwin Elman, who echoed Belotte’s calls for an inquest.
A spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Coroner said that while the circumstances of Quinn’s death don’t meet the criteria for a mandatory inquest, “the family can certainly request a discretionary inquest and it would be considered.”
Quinn, in a family photo.
Elman highlighted that Ontario’s child protection law emphasizes the duty to report when a child is believed to be in danger, and questioned how the children’s aid society, of all organizations, could have failed to do so — “I would expect the idea of the duty to report to be paramount in a children’s aid society office building.”
If ever there was a death that was preventable, “surely this is the one,” said Kiaras Gharabaghi, a professor in child and youth care and dean of the Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University.
“And it raises a fairly obvious question, which is: If an agency entrusted to protect children from harm can’t do that in their own building, then how are they going to do that in the community?”
Quinn wasn’t yet speaking, but was an “intelligent, beautiful son,” Belotte said. “He was like the perfect child. He slept peacefully. He didn’t really bother nobody; he just did his own thing.”
Belotte dreamed of his son becoming a scientist and one day working for NASA. “I was growing with my son, learning to be a father, and all of that has been taken away,” he said.
On Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, Cousins-Emily went to the CAS to visit her own son under the supervision of a volunteer, Anastassia Blokhina, who arrived around 9:35 a.m. to find Cousins-Emily and Quinn already there; Cousins-Emily said in response to a question from Blokhina that the boy was her nephew.
Blokhina testified it was “out of the ordinary” that no staff were present at the building beyond a security guard. A few phone calls were made, and eventually, a family service worker, Nibras Safar Allawardi, came down even though she wasn’t scheduled to work that day. Safar Allawardi had just been hired three months previously, after three months as an intern.
Shardanae Cousins-Emily.
Neither Blokhina nor Safar Allawardi — aged 34 and 26, respectively, when they appeared at trial — testified about having any concerns about Cousins-Emily showing up with another child despite only having supervised access to her own son.
Elman told the Star that if he had been supervising Cousins-Emily’s visit, he would have at least had questions. “I would be making a call to my supervisor and saying, ‘Hey, this is a situation, what should we be doing?’” he said.
The lack of questioning speaks to a “tunnel vision” that’s common in child-protection work, Gharabaghi said, explaining that the workers would have had their view only on the “task at hand” — the child who had to have a supervised visit with his mom.
Blokhina said the visit went well, as both the boy and Quinn played with toys in a large playroom. “It was just a normal visit,” she testified.
Safar Allawardi said her role was the overall supervision of all of the visits in the building that day, of which there were about eight. Regarding Cousins-Emily’s visit being supervised by Blokhina, Safar Allawardi testified: “I had just asked Ana if she needed anything, and she did not, so I left the playroom.”
Both Safar Allawardi and Blokhina testified they had no concerns about Cousins-Emily’s behaviour during the visit; Safar Allawardi said if she had, she would have removed both children.
Shardanae Cousins-Emily enters the bathroom at the Toronto children’s aid society on Dec. 2, 2023, with Quinn in the stroller.
Ontario Superior Court exhibit
Shardanae Cousins-Emily exits the bathroom more than an hour later with Quinn in the stroller — neither of them wearing pants.
Ontario Superior Court exhibit
‘It’s kids supervising kids’
After her son returned home with his dad, Cousins-Emily left the CAS building with Quinn, only to return later and enter the washroom around 3:30 p.m. By that point, Blokhina’s shift had ended, and she was gone. Safar Allawardi was still in the building until 4:40 p.m., but didn’t see Cousins-Emily and Quinn return.
Cousins-Emily didn’t emerge from the washroom — with the badly beaten Quinn in the stroller — until 4:45 p.m., after Safar Allawardi said she had left for the day.
The surveillance footage clearly shows Cousins-Emily entering the bathroom wearing pants, yet when she came out, neither she nor Quinn were wearing anything below the waist. (Crown attorneys Rochelle Liberman and Carimé Boehr argued that Cousins-Emily had used the clothing to wipe up some of the blood in the bathroom.)
Security guard Amritparkash Singh, an approximately 21-year-old employee from Peregrine Protection, testified that he noticed an injury on the boy’s forehead that looked like a “circle.” He asked Cousins-Emily what happened, and she replied that the boy had hurt himself while playing outside.
Autopsy photos presented at trial show a large, dark red bruise on Quinn’s forehead, with what appears to be a bright-red gash in the centre. Singh offered twice to call an ambulance, as well as to get a Band-Aid — “I thought, like, it’s a small kid, so maybe they need” the ambulance, Singh testified at the murder trial, through a Punjabi interpreter.
Cousins-Emily declined the offers.
“That’s a little strange, don’t you think?” defence lawyer Jacob Stilman asked in cross-examination.
Singh replied: “No, she said she’s just going to go home, the child is sleeping.”
He also agreed with Stilman that it was “strange” for Cousins-Emily to be taking the child outside in December without pants — but he also didn’t try to stop them.
After they left, Singh went into the washroom and took photos of the scene. They show blood splattered across the bathroom stall — on the stall door, the floor, beneath the toilet, and on the diaper-changing station. He attached the photos to an incident report, though it’s unclear who, if anyone, saw the report before it was later turned over to the police; the document wasn’t entered as an exhibit at trial.
Peregrine Protection and Singh’s lawyer, Barry Cox, said it would be inappropriate to provide any comment given that the matter remains before the courts, “other than to express mine and my clients’ deepest sympathies to Mr. Belotte.”
Pointing to the young age of both Singh and Safar Allawardi, the only staff member on site that day, Belotte told the Star: “It’s kids supervising kids. If there were experienced people in the building that day, my son would still be alive. He would be six years old. He would be in school.”
Yverson Belotte says he’s trying to let Quinn live on through him.
Steve Russell/Toronto Star
‘The cleaner for the building had already cleaned the bathroom’
A Toronto police forensic identification officer was dispatched to the children’s aid offices on Dec. 4, 2023, two days after the incident, and only after police had responded to 911 calls from Cousins-Emily’s apartment building about the unresponsive Quinn.
But the murder scene was essentially gone.
“I was made aware that the cleaner for the building had already cleaned the bathroom,” Det. Const. Robert Jitta testified.
Jitta went back the following day and marked some areas of the bathroom as “blind swab areas” based on the blood in Singh’s photos, and also marked areas where he could still see tiny spots. Samples from the bottom of the toilet and the changing station came back as a match for Quinn’s DNA.
The photo taken inside the children’s aid society bathroom by security guard Amritparkash Singh, showing blood splattered all over the stall.
Ontario Superior Court exhibit
A photo of the bathroom taken by Toronto police Det. Const. Robert Jitta on Dec. 4, 2023, showing the blood had been cleaned up.
Ontario Superior Court exhibit
The cleaner also told Jitta that she had emptied most of the garbage cans from the bathroom into a bin out back. There, police found a diaper and tissue, both covered in blood and potentially just days away from being lost for good.
While both the security guard and likely the cleaner were not permanent employees of the children’s aid society, Gharabaghi said it was still incumbent upon the society to provide some form of training to people working in the building on the duty to report.
“How do you not prepare people to understand what they’re seeing?” he asked. “I think that’s a major issue.”
If it wasn’t for the “amazing police officers,” there likely would not have been a strong case against Cousins-Emily, Belotte said.
At the end of the day, he said, children’s aid is the organization “taking kids away from their families — and sometimes they have a good reason — but here’s my son, his limp body in the stroller in your guys’ building, and you still manage to stay quiet throughout the whole process?”
And, he continued, “you guys still find a way to go clean up the blood … That almost cost me justice for my son’s life.”
Belotte said he now tells people that he had to “kill the old me” so that he can let Quinn live through him.
“I’m living for my son, so everything he didn’t get to see, the life he didn’t get to live, I’m going to do it for him,” Belotte said.
“I’m a daddy forever. No one’s ever going to take that away from me.”