Ashley Smith’s mother describes daughter’s deterioration
Problems didn’t start until Grade 8
Awarm, wee slice of the Maritimes has arrived at the Ontario coroner’s inquest examining the grim prison death of teenager Ashley Smith.
With a gracious handshake and proffered condolences from the presiding coroner, Dr. John Carlisle, Ashley’s mother, Coralee, swept into court Wednesday.
Within 10 minutes, speaking with a soft New Brunswick accent, Smith from the witness stand was proudly introducing her grandson, Jordan, and her other daughter, Donna, to the small room.
The trio travelled f rom the family’s home in Moncton for Smith’s appearance here. Though a so-called “party” with standing at the inquest, which means she is represented by a lawyer, she is testifying here of her own volition.
At 65 (“Do I have to [say]?” she asked with a grin), Smith still cuts a rather glamorous figure.
But her evidence, which will continue Thursday, was anything but.
Ashley asphyxiated in her segregation cell at the Grand Valley Institution for Women, a federal prison, on Oct. 19, 2007. She was just 19.
Under gentle questioning from coroner’s counsel Marg Creal, Smith described the harrowing deterioration of the young woman she adopted at three days old.
For the first time since the inquest began about six weeks ago, the jurors saw pictures of Ashley that weren’t taken in custody — as a sunny toddler at the age of 2, with her beloved cousin Cory; at the age of about 10 at “the one and only birthday party she would have;” as a young teen fresh from shooting hoops, and two close-up self-portraits of Ashley’s broad face.
It was clear, at least in this early stage of her testimony, that at the time her daughter was declining, Smith wasn’t aware of many of the dreadful details, in part because Ashley was protective of her, the way children are of their parents, and in part because, as Smith said, out of “self-preservation,” she didn’t press Ashley for information. “Maybe,” she said, “I didn’t want any more details.” Significantly, though, she was adamant that while Ashley had serious behavioural issues starting in about Grade 8, she never engaged in self-harm until she first was in custody.
By the time Ashley ended up at Grand Valley in Kitchener, Ont., the last in a series of federal prisons she bounced around like a ping-pong ball, she was “tying up,” or wrapping homemade ligatures tightly around her neck, as often as nine times a day.
Correctional officers there, who have testified at the inquest, described countless times they cut off ligatures from Ashley, or saw her turn blue from lack of oxygen.
The guards also described the ruinous physical effects on the teenager, and these were only the ones they could see — a permanent line developing on her neck and burst blood vessels in her face. Ashley herself complained, in the weeks before her death, to several guards about losing her vision.
“She wasn’t doing that (tying ligatures),” Smith said firmly, “before she went to the youth centre.”
The only hint of self-mutilation Smith ever saw on Ashley were superficial scratches on the inside of her wrist.
“Who does that?” Smith asked. “I didn’t ask her. I knew they (the scratches) were there. I never approached the scratching (in conversation with Ashley).”
Records show that Ashley began tying up at the New Brunswick Youth Centre, the only secure-custody facility for young people in the province, where she spent much of her adolescence, about 75 per cent of it in segregation.
“She was in segregation 27 of the 36 months that child was incarcerated” there, Smith snapped at one point.
The centre called segregation “T.Q.”, short for Therapeutic Quiet, though Smith reversed the initials and remembered it as “Q.T., Quiet Time. That sounds kind of nice,” she said. “Pretty little initials. Turns out to be full segregation.”
Still, she said, she visited Ashley at NBYC most weeks.
But after Ashley turned 18 and her youth sentence was converted to an adult one — and then, because it added up to more than two years, transferred to the federal system — Smith began a frantic game of trying to catch up with her daughter as she was moved hither and yon.
The jurors have heard that Ashley was transferred 17 times, from one prison to another or to a psychiatric unit, in the 11.5 months she spent in the federal system. For virtually all that time, she was in segregation. As her mother put it, “That segregation status follows you from one institution to another.”
Smith would arrange for one prison to send her the forms all visitors must fill out, and she would fill them out and return them, but often, by the time she was approved, Ashley had been moved, and Smith would have to begin the process all over again with the new prison.