VANCOUVER - When she was just six years old, an aboriginal girl with a bad heart watched her beloved mother smoke crack cocaine in their Kamloops home, where the fridge and cupboards sat empty.

Social workers were alerted about Paige’s living conditions and yanked her from the home — one of multiple times in her short life that she was temporarily taken from her addicted mother due to violence or neglect.

This time, in February 2000, she was sent to live with her maternal grandmother, despite a history of substance use and domestic violence in that home. Social workers did not conduct safety checks on other adults living in the house.

A year later, after Paige had been returned to her struggling mother, the seven-year-old child complained her grandmother’s boyfriend had molested her.

Police investigated, but no charges were laid after Paige recanted when a relative expressed anger over the allegation.

Three more child-protection reports over the next two years were made to MCFD about the mother’s drug use and Paige’s exposure to violence.

Social workers repeatedly closed Paige’s file though, concluding each time that she was safe.

It was this traumatic start to life, a new report by B.C.’s children’s representative says, that ultimately led Paige to self-destruct in the Downtown Eastside at age 19, overdosing in a communal washroom inside a social housing building by Oppenheimer Park.

She was the third generation to meet this end: both her mother and maternal grandmother also died of overdoses.

The report penned by Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond harshly criticizes front-line workers who interacted with Paige, whose last name was not provided. Social workers, medical professionals, educators and police collectively failed to keep her safe, the report said.

And this is not an isolated case, Turpel-Lafond said. She estimates there are 100 to 150 at-risk children in B.C. who need urgent intervention — most are Aboriginal, and most are female.

Over 75 pages, Paige’s Story: Abuse, Indifference and a Young Life Discarded, tells the brutally relentless story of this girl’s life.

Even Paige’s early years were rocky, as she was pulled from and then returned to her mother’s chaotic home. Daycare teachers said the toddler was unkept with poor hygiene, and was acting out in a sexualized manner. She was often preoccupied about her mother’s well-being.

“I’m worried about my mommy,” she would tell her teachers.

In an interview with The Sun, Paige’s great aunt Fran Robson said the girl always looked after her ailing mother, even from a young age.

“She was caring. She was very sensitive,” Robson said. “She put other people before herself.”

But Paige had her own health problems. At age two, she was diagnosed with Marfan syndrome, which left her with serious heart problems and legally blind. She spent large chunks of her life without access to her heart medication and without glasses to see.

Between the ages of three and 13, Paige moved 15 times between her mother’s care, relatives’ houses and foster homes in Kamloops and Fort St. James. She also lived, at one point, in a crack house.

In March 2006, Paige’s mother was on the RCMP’s most-wanted list for extortion. The pair was homeless, and MCFD social workers noted in their files they could not locate the girl. She was 12 years old.

Paige was eventually placed in an emergency foster home, where she admitted she was depressed, suicidal and already using alcohol and drugs. She bonded with these foster parents, but was moved to another home after her mother started to sleep outside Paige’s bedroom window and yell at the family.

In July 2007, when Paige was 14, MCFD sent her back to live with her mother, who had been diagnosed with substance-induced mood disorder, had been certified under the Mental Health Act several times, and went through bouts of homelessness and sex work.

Paige’s life spiralled downward that summer, with many documented notes by MCFD about drug use and related complications. Paige and her mother were also kicked out of a homeless shelter, after living on the street for a time.

From mid-2008 to early 2009, when Paige was 15, she stabilized while living with a relative. She went on a MCFD-sponsored youth agreement that provided her with money and a social worker who helped her attend doctor’s appointments for her heart condition.

This positive period ended in 2009 when, at age 16, Paige was allowed to return to her mother, who relocated to the Downtown Eastside.

Over the next three years, until her death, Paige moved 50 more times, landing in homeless shelters, safe houses, youth detox centres, two foster homes, and various decrepit hotels.

In September 2009, Paige registered at an east Vancouver high school to enter Grade 10. The school counsellor called her education file “traumatic” with multiple documented calls to MCFD, and wondered why there had not been more intervention to protect the girl, who was “really keen to be a student.”

Later that fall, the school described Paige as “resilient, hardworking, independent and having a positive attitude,” but she was only attending class 25 per cent of the time. It is unclear whether school officials knew that Paige had lost her home again, this time kicked out of a transition house because of her mother’s erratic behaviour.

Over the next few years, Paige had three abortions, lived on the streets or in decrepit conditions, started and stopped school several times, and was sent repeatedly to detox or jail after being found stumbling on the street.

Again and again, officials would remark in social worker reports, or police notebooks, or court files that Paige’s life desperately needed intervention, but there was no concerted effort to help her.

One MCFD report, written in 2011 when Paige was 17, said: “This youth has a mom who is on the street and has basically abandoned her. The child was also living on the street for a long time. She is a sweet girl with a major alcohol problem.”

Robson, Paige’s maternal great aunt who worked at the Ray-Cam centre in the Downtown Eastside, visited with the girl each week. She asked MCFD for money to rent a two-bedroom apartment so Paige could live with her. This was declined, which Turpel-Lafond described as “inexplicable.”

“They wouldn’t let us have her. She would come when she was hungry, needed a shower, to change,” said Robson, wiping away tears.

She was, however, able to save her niece’s cat, Mokie. When she went to see Paige and her mother in their rundown room at the notorious Balmoral hotel, the girl asked Robson to take Mokie, who she feared wouldn’t survive in the Downtown Eastside.

“Paige grabbed the cat and gave it a kiss and a hug,” recalled Robson, who is still caring for the pet.

In January 2012, when Paige was 18, she was placed in a foster home and, although she continued to binge and struggle, she developed a bond with the foster mother. But when she turned 19 in May of that year, she had to leave the home as that is the age when foster care services abruptly end.

She moved, instead, to a social housing building for at-risk youth beside Oppenheimer Park, a known area for drug use.

“After Paige was discharged from care at age 19, there was a marked deterioration in her ability to cope,” the report said. She started using crack and heroin. She was put on psychiatric drugs.

Eleven months after leaving foster care, in April 2013, Paige died alone in the communal washroom of her building.

She followed in the footsteps of her maternal grandmother, who also had a fatal overdose. Her mom would overdose a year later in a Downtown Eastside hotel room.

“Paige was left for years in a situation that no reasonable person would find acceptable for their own child, yet no one questioned it,” Turpel-Lafond said.

She wonders if racism is to blame for the lack of coordinated effort to save Paige.

“The negative and dangerous pathways for Aboriginal girls ... can be changed, but only if we change our expectations, practices and outcomes. That change will never truly come if indifference remains the standard of care.”

lculbert@vancouversun.com

Twitter: @loriculbert

Click here to read the report by B.C.'s children's representative

with files from Rob Shaw

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Click here to read From Care to Where, the Vancouver Sun series on what happens when foster kids 'age out' of the system

Read Tracy Sherlock's blog on this story: 19-year-old former foster child died within a year of leaving care