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From chubby and content children, to gaunt faces and prominent bones – those are the changes a child protection worker described in two young girls after they were placed in the care of Kevin and Tammy Goforth.
The Goforths are on trial facing charges of second-degree murder in the death of a four-year-old girl and causing bodily harm to a two-year-old girl in 2012.
The trial continued into the third day on Wednesday, with testimony from the child-protection worker and foster mothers who had cared for the children before they were placed with the Goforths.
Alicia Ward took the stand as court opened in the morning. She has been a child-protection worker with the Ministry of Social Services since 2008.
Ward spoke quickly at first, saying she was nervous.
She described the circumstances that led to the two and four-year-old girls being seized by Social Services, and how they were moved to nine different short-term placements while she looked for a more long-term solution.
At each placement, Ward described the girls’ condition as good. She described them as “chubby”, quiet, and in some cases affectionate toward her, giving her hugs. Ward testified there were some concerns that the four-year-old wasn’t speaking as much as she developmentally should be.
The Goforths were identified by one of Ward’s colleagues as a possibility for long-term placement. They were checked and approved, but Ward testified it took several conversations and three weekend visits before the girls were placed with the couple.
Ward testified the last time she saw the girls before they were hospitalized in August 2012 was in November 2011, for the two-year-old, and December 2011 for the four-year-old.
The Goforths fell under a specific class of caregiver that doesn’t have legal status with the ministry. Ward said, at the time, there were no required checks on the situation at home after the girls were placed in their care.
In court, Ward was asked to identify and describe several pictures of the girls. As she opened the binder to the first photos, she seemed to almost smile at the happy pictures of the children.
Her face tightened as she was directed to move to later photos, further back in the binder, and she described the changes in the girls in the photos from the last time she’d seen them.
Looking at a photo of the four-year-old, Ward said “her face is gaunt, her body is slender; you can see the bones in her shoulders”.
“Her face is gaunt, her body is slender; you can see the bones in her shoulders” – Child-protection worker Alicia Ward
Describing a photo of the two-year-old, Ward said: “she is much thinner in her face, she’s bruised, and then she had a scar on her face”.
Sobs could be heard from family members seated at the back of the courtroom as Ward spoke.
Ward used notes as reference as she testified. Tammy Goforth’s defence council, Jeff Deagle, took issue with some of the notes, asking about an injury the two-year-old sustained, and a request for medicine that wasn’t in them. Deagle eventually concluded that her notes were not complete.
Deagle also took issue with a document Ward said she’d read to the Goforths, eventually saying that the document that had been brought to court wasn’t the same one read to Tammy Goforth.
In the afternoon, court heard testimony from two foster mothers who cared for the girls before their placement with the Goforths.
Both women described happy children with chubby cheeks.
One of the foster mothers admitted she had heard other caregivers describe the girls as troubled. One took them to a doctor because they were throwing up. The doctor advised that she was overfeeding the girls.
On Tuesday, forensic officers described in more detail the condition of the two girls after they were admitted to hospital, and their living conditions.