Pubdate: Fri, 11 Jan 2002
Source: Province, The (CN BC)
Copyright: 2002 The Province
Contact:  http://www.canada.com/vancouver/theprovince/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/476
Author: Joey Thompson

DEATH BY MORPHINE, AND NEGLECT

Grieving Mom Claims Mounties Failed To Get Medical Help That Would 
Have Saved Her Son

There was no denying the lift in Jeanette Beadle's mood that day; the 
Vancouver Island woman let her thoughts wander to the time when her 
son would be dad to his baby boy again.

The phone call had done it; Adam, giving in to a heart brimming with 
hope, told her he had been offered 10 days at the Campbell River 
hospital's detox centre. He was to meet with the region's drug 
counsellor before packing his bags, followed by several months in a 
recovery centre.

The drug therapist was busy when Adam arrived for admission March 2, 
2001. Could he come back later?

He found her still busy at noon -- said he'd try again later.

But he couldn't. RCMP, figuring he was drunk in public, had him 
locked in a cell.

There was no denying the grief that engulfed Jeanette on the next 
call about her only son. Oh, the doctor did speak in the most gentle, 
compassionate tones. But it always comes out harsh, anyway, the 
business of telling a mom her son was dead.

But Adam hadn't touched a drop of liquor nor had he done street 
drugs. What the blood tests later showed was traces of an 
anti-depressant -- and morphine.

It was the morphine that killed him: Adam had died on the last day of 
a four-day diet of 60mg of methadone daily, the maximum dosage. The 
clinic doctor who wrote out the prescription -- an appetizer for 
heroin addicts but overkill for anyone else -- failed to check out 
Adam's false story about heroin use with his physician.

The jury at Adam's inquest two months ago made several 
recommendations -- as inquest juries do -- in a bid to make sure it 
wouldn't happen to someone else's son.

But thanks to her own digging, Jeanette discovered it had -- three 
years earlier.

What hurt more was finding out that the jury on Adam's case had 
voiced some of the same concerns as the jurors in the previous 
death-in-a-cell inquest; namely, police had failed to follow 
long-established policy that prohibited them from jailing visibly 
ill, chemically dependent prisoners.

They hadn't done so, despite the fact top brass at RCMP 'E" division 
in Vancouver had taken pains to assure the previous regional coroner 
that yes, officers were being trained to deal with such problems.

"We will...place significantly greater emphasis on our first-aid 
training to members, guards and matrons so they may be better able to 
identify symptoms related to alcohol poisoning and drug overdose," 
wrote the officer in charge in 1999.

"This training will emphasize the requirement that a person be 
medically examined if he/she doesn't show signs of what can be 
reasonably characterized as minimum indicia of consciousness."

Jeanette, a rehabilitation worker for the brain-injured, claims 
Mounties wrote her son off as a loser, that jail guards saw he was 
frothing at the mouth but sought no medical attention for him. That 
they checked him up to 30 times during the evening, the reports 
showed, but made no attempt to help the motionless man.

The 42-year-old detailed her beefs in a recent submission to the RCMP 
Public Complaints Commission:

- - Mounties failed to recognize that Adam needed a hospital bed, not a 
cell bunk.

- - Officers were too cozy with the coroner (they even choose her) who 
was supposed to independently investigate her son's death.

- - Because of his drug use officers treated him as a nobody.

- - They failed to properly monitor him while in the RCMP cell.

- - Officers failed to notify Jeanette that her son had died while in their care.

"I feel there was some kind of cover up," she wrote the commission.

"A lot of information relating to my son's death was either missing 
or incomplete. I had to do my own digging to find out how Adam spent 
the last hours of his life. The RCMP were anything but co-operative. 
I think they just wrote him off."

We could too; after all, there were times in his life when he cared 
more about drugs than about living. But that's too easy. After all, 
Adam could be my son -- or yours; he was best buds with his mom -- an 
unmarried teenager from a strictly religious family when she 
delivered him by herself.

He was a remarkable athlete in high school, scouted out for his 
football prowess, had a shelf full of trophies, loved his family, 
coached baseball, taught boxing to kids and worked at a Vancouver 
Island sawmill for seven years after high school.

Said Jeanette between sobs: "I'm hoping the commission will take my 
concerns seriously, because I don't think the RCMP did."
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