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."