Young woman’s diary turned into a countdown to suicide
Mother wants to know why teen was allowed to live on her own at 16
Before turning 13, Carly Fraser was a happy, funny kid who made life easy for her mom. Then, all of a sudden, she wasn’t.
“The whole world changed,” her mother Lisa said. “She stopped talking. You’d get yes and no answers, you’d get, ‘I’m mad, I’m going to my room.’ It’s like, what happened?”
That sudden change in Carly’s personality marked the beginning of six years of pain and constant struggle for mother and daughter, culminating in Carly’s decision to throw herself off the Lions Gate Bridge in December. She died just 20 hours after turning 19 and aging out of government care, sending her mother on a heartbreaking search to discover what went wrong.
Carly was such an easy baby that Lisa often bragged to her friends about her trouble-free bed times. Even as a two-yearold, the Burnaby girl’s tantrums were few and far between.
“She was a great little kid. She was hilarious. She would say the funniest things all the time. Five, six times a day, I’d be laughing at her — and with her,” Lisa said.
She was also fearless, terrifying the adults in her life by running to the edge of high places so she could peek over the side.
But when her teenage years hit, Carly became closed off and moody. She wouldn’t talk to family members or counsellors about what was wrong. She switched schools, but soon was expelled for possessing marijuana.
By 15, Carly had attempted suicide once and was struggling to cope with her mother’s depression and panic attacks. One night, the two argued as never before, and when Lisa woke up the next day, Carly had packed her bags and disappeared.
The teenager told a social worker she couldn’t stand to live with her mother anymore and wanted to go into foster care.
“When she said she’s not living with me anymore and she’s out of here, what choice do you have? You could let her go to the street … or put her in foster care, where she could be supervised,” Lisa said.
From that point on, Carly refused to talk to her mother or look her in the eye during meetings with social workers and counsellors. Lisa said she sent her letters, money and even cake on her birthday, but she only heard back once — one simple “no” in response to a question.
“It was awful. How does it feel when your kid won’t talk to you — won’t look at you in the face? It’s like, what did I do? Tell me what I did,” Lisa said.
Carly appeared to be doing well in the group home. She was attending an alternative school and working part-time at a McDonald’s. But once again, her life took a sudden turn for the worse. When Carly turned 16, Lisa learned her daughter would be moving into a basement suite on her own.
Within a week, she was sexually assaulted. Lisa knows very little about the attack, but she sees the decision to move Carly out of the group home as the turning point in an already troubled life.
“The thing that changed everything was the moving into the basement suite. Not many people at 16 are ready to do that. She certainly wasn’t ready to do that,” Lisa said.
The assault prompted social workers to move Carly into a new group home in Coquitlam, but she ran away within two months and began living on the streets of downtown Vancouver. She was known to stop by drop-in centres for youth in the Downtown Eastside, but otherwise she had very little contact with adults.
Lisa would learn of her daughter’s death through Facebook, after seeing a post from a friend of Carly’s that suggested police were searching for a body below the Lions Gate Bridge.
The news was devastating. Lisa got Carly’s diaries, and learned she had been counting down the days until she jumped.
“There’s no explanations, really. It was all over the place,” Lisa said.
Carly was sexually assaulted twice and attempted suicide five times, her mother says. One psychiatric assessment suggested Carly suffered from borderline personality disorder, but Lisa said she saw little evidence her daughter was getting help.
Now, Lisa is coping thanks to support from family and friends, and trying to understand what happened — why Carly was allowed to live on her own at 16.
“(I’m) just trying to get the answers, which has been hard, which is why we’re here now,” Lisa said. “You ask everybody for all the information and you get none.”
Because Carly was a day older than 19 and aged out of the system, the children’s ministry refused to review her case. Minister Stephanie Cadieux asked her staff to double-check the policy ruling out an investigation.