Belotte<\/a> is suing the Children\u2019s 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 \u201cneglected to adequately ensure the safety\u201d of his son and failed to properly investigate the incident.<\/p>\nNo statements of defence have yet been filed.\u00a0<\/p>\n
The Toronto children\u2019s aid society sent a one-sentence response to the Star\u2019s list of questions regarding its handling of the incident: \u201cWe will not be providing comment as this matter is subject to ongoing legal proceedings.\u201d<\/p>\n
![\"Quinn.jpg\"](\"data:image\/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAQAAAADCAQAAAAe\/WZNAAAAEElEQVR42mM8U88ABowYDABAxQPltt5zqAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==\")
<\/p>\n
Yverson Belotte Jr., better known as Quintanni or simply Quinn.<\/p>\n
GoFundMe<\/p>\n
The murder of a \u2018perfect child\u2019<\/p>\n
The fact that a child was murdered at the children\u2019s aid society\u2019s offices is a \u201cmetaphor\u201d for how broken the child protection system is in Ontario, said former provincial child and youth advocate Irwin Elman, who echoed Belotte\u2019s calls for an inquest.<\/p>\n
A spokesperson for the Office of the Chief Coroner said that while the circumstances of Quinn\u2019s death don\u2019t meet the criteria for a mandatory inquest, \u201cthe family can certainly request a discretionary inquest and it would be considered.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Quinn, in a family photo.<\/p>\n
Elman highlighted that Ontario\u2019s child protection law emphasizes the duty to report when a child is believed to be in danger, and questioned how the children\u2019s aid society, of all organizations, could have failed to do so \u2014 \u201cI would expect the idea of the duty to report to be paramount in a children\u2019s aid society office building.\u201d<\/p>\n
If ever there was a death that was preventable, \u201csurely this is the one,\u201d said Kiaras Gharabaghi, a professor in child and youth care and dean of the Faculty of Community Services at Toronto Metropolitan University.<\/p>\n
\u201cAnd it raises a fairly obvious question, which is: If an agency entrusted to protect children from harm can\u2019t do that in their own building, then how are they going to do that in the community?\u201d<\/p>\n
Quinn wasn\u2019t yet speaking, but was an \u201cintelligent, beautiful son,\u201d Belotte said. \u201cHe was like the perfect child. He slept peacefully. He didn\u2019t really bother nobody; he just did his own thing.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Belotte dreamed of his son becoming a scientist and one day working for NASA. \u201cI was growing with my son, learning to be a father, and all of that has been taken away,\u201d he said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Blokhina testified it was \u201cout of the ordinary\u201d 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\u2019t scheduled to work that day. Safar Allawardi had just been hired three months previously, after three months as an intern.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shardanae Cousins-Emily.<\/p>\n
Neither Blokhina nor Safar Allawardi \u2014 aged 34 and 26, respectively, when they appeared at trial \u2014 testified about having any concerns about Cousins-Emily showing up with another child despite only having supervised access to her own son.<\/p>\n
Elman told the Star that if he had been supervising Cousins-Emily\u2019s visit, he would have at least had questions. \u201cI would be making a call to my supervisor and saying, \u2018Hey, this is a situation, what should we be doing?\u2019\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
The lack of questioning speaks to a \u201ctunnel vision\u201d that\u2019s common in child-protection work, Gharabaghi said, explaining that the workers would have had their view only on the \u201ctask at hand\u201d \u2014 the child who had to have a supervised visit with his mom.<\/p>\n
Blokhina said the visit went well, as both the boy and Quinn played with toys in a large playroom. \u201cIt was just a normal visit,\u201d she testified.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s visit being supervised by Blokhina, Safar Allawardi testified: \u201cI had just asked Ana if she needed anything, and she did not, so I left the playroom.\u201d<\/p>\n
Both Safar Allawardi and Blokhina testified they had no concerns about Cousins-Emily\u2019s behaviour during the visit; Safar Allawardi said if she had, she would have removed both children.\u00a0<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shardanae Cousins-Emily enters the bathroom at the Toronto children\u2019s aid society on Dec. 2, 2023, with Quinn in the stroller.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ontario Superior Court exhibit <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Shardanae Cousins-Emily exits the bathroom more than an hour later with Quinn in the stroller \u2014 neither of them wearing pants.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ontario Superior Court exhibit <\/p>\n
\u2018It\u2019s kids supervising kids\u2019<\/p>\n
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\u2019s shift had ended, and she was gone. Safar Allawardi was still in the building until 4:40 p.m., but didn\u2019t see Cousins-Emily and Quinn return.<\/p>\n
Cousins-Emily didn\u2019t emerge from the washroom \u2014 with the badly beaten Quinn in the stroller \u2014 until 4:45 p.m., after Safar Allawardi said she had left for the day.<\/p>\n
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 Carim\u00e9 Boehr argued that Cousins-Emily had used the clothing to wipe up some of the blood in the bathroom.)<\/p>\n
Security guard Amritparkash Singh, an approximately 21-year-old employee from Peregrine Protection, testified that he noticed an injury on the boy\u2019s forehead that looked like a \u201ccircle.\u201d He asked Cousins-Emily what happened, and she replied that the boy had hurt himself while playing outside.<\/p>\n
Autopsy photos presented at trial show a large, dark red bruise on Quinn\u2019s 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 \u2014 \u201cI thought, like, it\u2019s a small kid, so maybe they need\u201d the ambulance, Singh testified at the murder trial, through a Punjabi interpreter.<\/p>\n
Cousins-Emily declined the offers.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat\u2019s a little strange, don\u2019t you think?\u201d defence lawyer Jacob Stilman asked in cross-examination.<\/p>\n
Singh replied: \u201cNo, she said she\u2019s just going to go home, the child is sleeping.\u201d<\/p>\n
He also agreed with Stilman that it was \u201cstrange\u201d for Cousins-Emily to be taking the child outside in December without pants \u2014 but he also didn\u2019t try to stop them.<\/p>\n
After they left, Singh went into the washroom and took photos of the scene. They show blood splattered across the bathroom stall \u2014 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\u2019s unclear who, if anyone, saw the report before it was later turned over to the police; the document wasn\u2019t entered as an exhibit at trial.<\/p>\n
Peregrine Protection and Singh\u2019s lawyer, Barry Cox, said it would be inappropriate to provide any comment given that the matter remains before the courts, \u201cother than to express mine and my clients\u2019 deepest sympathies to Mr. Belotte.\u201d<\/p>\n
Pointing to the young age of both Singh and Safar Allawardi, the only staff member on site that day, Belotte told the Star: \u201cIt\u2019s 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Yverson Belotte says he\u2019s trying to let\u00a0Quinn live on through him.<\/p>\n
Steve Russell\/Toronto Star<\/p>\n
\u2018The cleaner for the building had already cleaned the bathroom\u2019<\/p>\n
A Toronto police forensic identification officer was dispatched to the children\u2019s aid offices on Dec. 4, 2023, two days after the incident, and only after police had responded to 911 calls from Cousins-Emily\u2019s apartment building about the unresponsive Quinn.<\/p>\n
But the murder scene was essentially gone.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was made aware that the cleaner for the building had already cleaned the bathroom,\u201d Det. Const. Robert Jitta testified.<\/p>\n
Jitta went back the following day and marked some areas of the bathroom as \u201cblind swab areas\u201d based on the blood in Singh\u2019s 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\u2019s DNA.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
The photo taken inside the children\u2019s aid society bathroom by security guard Amritparkash Singh, showing blood splattered all over the stall.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ontario Superior Court exhibit <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
A photo of the bathroom taken by Toronto police Det. Const. Robert Jitta on Dec. 4, 2023, showing the blood had been cleaned up.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ontario Superior Court exhibit <\/p>\n
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.\u00a0<\/p>\n
While both the security guard and likely the cleaner were not permanent employees of the children\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cHow do you not prepare people to understand what they\u2019re seeing?\u201d he asked. \u201cI think that\u2019s a major issue.\u201d<\/p>\n
If it wasn\u2019t for the \u201camazing police officers,\u201d there likely would not have been a strong case against Cousins-Emily, Belotte said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
At the end of the day, he said, children\u2019s aid is the organization \u201ctaking kids away from their families \u2014 and sometimes they have a good reason \u2014 but here\u2019s my son, his limp body in the stroller in your guys\u2019 building, and you still manage to stay quiet throughout the whole process?\u201d<\/p>\n
And, he continued, \u201cyou guys still find a way to go clean up the blood \u2026 That almost cost me justice for my son\u2019s life.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Belotte said he now tells people that he had to \u201ckill the old me\u201d so that he can let Quinn live through him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m living for my son, so everything he didn\u2019t get to see, the life he didn\u2019t get to live, I\u2019m going to do it for him,\u201d Belotte said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a daddy forever. No one\u2019s ever going to take that away from me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How does someone manage to murder a child inside the headquarters of the children\u2019s aid society? It\u2019s a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":480568,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[194291],"tags":[49,48,3302],"class_list":["post-480567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-toronto","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-toronto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=480567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/480567\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/480568"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=480567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=480567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=480567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}