WINNIPEG - The drowning of a six-year-old boy who was stripped and forced into a lake on a Manitoba reserve by three other boys is clear evidence of a community in crisis, a former resident says.
Adam Keeper died last Tuesday at the Pauingassi First Nation reserve about 300 kilometres northeast of Winnipeg.
Edna Nabess, a former volunteer child services workers who left the reserve this summer, said she regularly saw children in the remote community neglected by their parents and left to fend for themselves.
"People would drink and the kids would just be running around all over the place,'' Nabess said Monday.
"Some of them came and slept at my place ... and I would feed them and send them home in the morning, and the parents didn't go look for them or anything.''
RCMP Sgt. Steve Colwell said the three boys involved in Keeper's death, aged between seven and nine, cannot be held criminally responsible because they're under 12. The case has been turned over to Manitoba Child and Family Services.
Pauingassi Chief Harold Crow said the three boys have been sent to Winnipeg for counselling.
Nabess said alcoholism is rampant in Pauingassi, and children imitate the violence they see committed by adults.
Last spring, two girls aged 13 and 15 were charged with second-degree murder in the beating death of a 22-year-old woman.
"The kids are acting out,'' said Nabess. "To me this is a cry for help and no one is listening.''
Crow said the community is always in a crisis partly because of its remote location and lack of services, but said Keeper's death was not connected to alcohol or solvent abuse.
He said the kids were only alone for a short time.
"These kids were just playing and for some reason they were out of the line of sight for awhile and then the thing happened,'' Crow said, adding the kids were only a few hundred metres from the nearest home.
The reserve has taken steps to cut gasoline sniffing and other social problems, Crow said, but has limited resources.
He acknowledged that the reserve, which is a half-hour boat ride from the nearest RCMP detachment, can be violent.
"If we have a crisis at night, sometimes the RCMP don't want to come by boat because they don't want to lose their members.''
Manitoba Child and Family Services does not comment on specific cases.
The province would not say whether the level of parental supervision, which is mandatory for kids under 12 under provincial law, will be part of its investigation.
"Certainly children can play in a part of the house where they might be unsupervised for short periods of time, or they may be playing in a yard or in the neighbourhood, but it's always with an assessment around. What is the child doing ... how frequently is the adult able to maintain contact to ensure safety,'' said Linda Burnside, director of authority relations with the department's child protection branch.
Pauingassi has a long history of trouble, mostly involving alcohol and solvent abuse.
In 2005, officials estimated more than 20 per cent of residents, including half of the school-aged children, were addicted to sniffing gasoline.
More than a dozen people have committed suicide since 2000, including a 16-year-old boy who took his life just four days after being released from a treatment program in 2005.
