MARTIN: Details of toddler’s final days truly horrific

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Monstrous!

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Perhaps there’s no more a fitting word than that to describe the abuse little Gabriel Sinclair-Pasqua suffered at the hands of his parents in the days before his death.

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The 18-month-old must have suffered excruciating pain before succumbing to a combination of blunt force head trauma which resulted in brain injury and from an untreated major burn to 33 per cent of his body, which led to sepsis.

The boy died on Oct. 5, 2021, when his mother finally called 911 to seek medical help for the toddler, but it was way too late.

When first responders arrived at the Radisson Heights home of his parents shortly before noon that day they found little Gabriel dead, with his extremities almost cold to the touch, according to a statement of agreed facts made a court exhibit last week.

Sonya Pasqua and Michael Sinclair, the boy’s parents, each pleaded guilty to a charge of manslaughter, admitting they were negligent in their parental care of the child.

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The facts leading up to their pleas are horrific.

Sometime on Sept. 27 or 28, 2021, just six weeks after Gabriel was returned to his parents’ care after being turned over to Pasqua’s uncle, Gerry Bakoway, two days after his March 31, 2020, birth, the toddler suffered significant burns to his body.

Pasqua and Sinclair gave police conflicting explanations about how the boy suffered his various injuries, but they discussed him being injured in a series of text exchanges the afternoon of Sept. 28, 2021, read into court by Crown prosecutor Carolina Valenzuela.

In one message Sinclair wrote: “We need him to heal and then we can send him off to a facility ’cause we still need him as a paycheque,” the prosecutor told court.

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An autopsy conducted on the child found he was emaciated and dehydrated and showed evidence of numerous injuries.

“Multiple mainly recent blunt force injuries on his scalp, with multiple contusions, obscured by burn injuries,” Valenzuela said.

He also had healing burn wounds, both second- and third-degree burns “involving approximately 33 per cent of total body surface area.”

The burns were to multiple areas, including Gabriel’s scalp, left side of his face and shoulders, along with “roughly diaper distribution” including his buttocks and genitalia.

“The pattern of the burns are consistent with boiling liquid being spilled on Gabriel from above and pooling in his diaper where the absorbent material of the diaper would have contained the boiling liquid and continued to burn him as the diaper remained on,” court heard.

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Pasqua gave various dates and mechanisms for how Gabriel suffered the burns and in a police interview on the day of the boy’s death, Sinclair said he had noticed “minor burns” that they treated with honey.

What’s clear is the wounds were neither minor, nor ones that would heal through honey balms, or on their own. For approximately the last week of his life, Gabriel would have been in excruciating pain.

The parents admitted “that they engaged in an unlawful omission, namely, failing to discharge their legal duty to provide Gabriel with necessary medical care.”

Both struggled with substance addiction and had gone through multiple programs for abuse issues and parenting education.

The fact is, the child should never have been removed from his great uncle’s home on Aug. 13, 2021, and returned to his parents, who clearly weren’t adequately able to care for him.

Before Gabriel was placed in the care of Pasqua and Sinclair he was described by a worker as “developing normally, happy and social,” while with Bakoway and his wife Alice Finley, who sat in court last week listening to the shocking details of the toddler’s final days.

The parents will face sentencing in the New Year.

After that there needs to be an inquiry into Gabriel’s death, in hopes that no other child suffers so horribly and needlessly as he did.

KMartin@postmedia.com

X: @KMartinCourts

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