The former government-run group home where Traevon Chalifoux-Desjarlais died in Abbotsford, B.C., on Nov. 18, 2020.Rafal Gerszak/The Globe and Mail
Cree foster teen Traevon Desjarlais-Chalifoux wanted a female mental health counsellor and would have benefited greatly from an Indigenous clinician, but neither of these options were available to him, his former counsellor told a coroner’s inquest into his 2020 suicide.
Counsellor Caleb Reardon testified Monday that the troubled teen never really opened up to him in the year before his death in September, 2020. Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux missed 16 sessions during this period and the pair took a three-month break when the first wave of COVID-19 pandemic protections were enacted in March, 2020.
Mr. Reardon, who has a master’s degree in counselling, said it can regularly take two to six months to create trust and transparency for the non-Indigenous professionals with the Aboriginal Child and Youth Mental Health team, an arm of the provincial Ministry of Child and Family Development. The understaffed and underfunded provincial agency helps struggling First Nations teens in the Fraser Valley east of Vancouver.
Mr. Reardon testified at the sixth day of hearings in Burnaby, B.C., that the teen never trusted him enough to go beyond very surface-level conversations about his persistent fear his enemies might mace him in public again or the problems he was having with his extended family, who had fostered him since he was apprehended from his mother a day after being born in 2003.
The inquest was called this spring after a Globe and Mail investigation into the death of the 17-year-old, whose body was discovered in his bedroom closet four days after he was reported missing. The Globe found serious deficiencies at the organization in charge of his care, Xyolhemeylh – also known as the Fraser Valley Aboriginal Children and Family Services Society. Xyolhemeylh is one of 24 Indigenous Child and Family Service agencies charged with providing foster care to First Nations, Métis and Inuit children and youth in British Columbia.
Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux, who had learning disabilities, fetal alcohol syndrome, ADHD and was a past victim of sexual and physical abuse, wanted a female counsellor, but none was available.
Mr. Reardon told the jurors and a dozen lawyers in attendance that his agency has been understaffed for over a decade and that, at the time of the teen’s suicide, he was seeing clients in his region of Abbotsford as well as covering for a colleague in the neighbouring suburb of Mission. As well, Mr. Reardon testified, none of the government-provided counsellors is Indigenous and his region “desperately yearned” to have an elder on staff that could have talked with youth like Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux.
“I’m a non-Indigenous person trying to come and help, he doesn’t see me as a sense of safety or as someone that could potentially help him,” he testified. “I was really trying to double down on my way to build a relationship with him because if I’m not someone he values or trusts in his life then anything I say, anything I do, it’s just another person from the ministry that is trying to talk to him.”
Mr. Reardon testified that a local elder had given him and others on his team permission to conduct to two Indigenous ceremonies with his clients, but said he has never felt comfortable doing so.
The inquest’s five jurors are tasked with determining when and how Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux died and with making recommendations for systemic changes that could prevent other foster children from dying in similar circumstances.
Less than a month before the teen killed himself, he issued a “quasi-threat,” asking Mr. Reardon: “If I’m overwhelmed, what if I just hurt myself really bad, would you care?”
Mr. Reardon testified he told Mr. Desjarlais-Chalifoux that he and others in his life did care about him and wanted him to feel better. Mr. Reardon said Monday he took no further action after determining the teen, who had been banging his head through his bedroom wall that summer, was not a high risk to attempt a suicide.
“Traevon didn’t spike that alarm for me,” Mr. Reardon testified. “He was only saying ‘No, I’m mad, I just want people to care about me.’ ”