Five years after she strangled herself in an Ontario prison cell as guards looked on, no one has been accountable for Ashley Smithâs death, her mother testified.
Speaking at a Toronto inquiry into her daughterâs death, Coralee Smith said her 19-year-old daughter shouldnât have been in prison in the first place.
"I still see no accountability. Ashley died on the floor. There was no help for her," Smith, 65, told the inquest jurors. "Ladies and gentlemen, this was Canada. Inmates are allowed to take their own lives, and I say with assistance, because they stood around."
Smith told jurors about her last visit with her daughter, saying she appeared to have lost weight following years of segregation.
"I watched them take her down the hall," Smith said. "It was the last time I saw Ashley alive."
During her Wednesday appearance at the inquest, Smith described her daughter as a happy child who was always smiling, though she began acting out in her teens.
The Smithâs family lawyer Julian Falconer says itâs important the inquiry hears who Ashley was before she entered the prison system at age 15.
âOne of the risks that you run in these very larges cases is that, believe it or not, you almost forget the humanity at stake,â Falconer told CTVâs Canada AM on Thursday. âI think it was always central to Coralee and to the entire family that Ashleyâs memory, her legacy, not be forgotten.â
Falconer said Smith made every effort to visit her daughter while she was incarcerated, but faced a number of roadblocks.
âAshley was transferred 17 times in an 11-and-a-half month period,â Falconer said. âIt was literally, as Coralee described it, chasing a moving target in terms of seeing her daughter.â
Smith testified that she didnât know her daughter spent so much time in segregation, or that she was repeatedly choking herself.
Ashley died in October 2007 when she strangled herself in her cell at the Grand Valley Institution in Kitchener, Ont. Guards watched, having received orders not to enter her cell unless she stopped breathing.
"Who gives such orders? No one has stood up,â Smith said. âThe guards were there and they were hands on. Who passes the orders down?"
She had first been sent to jail at 15 for throwing crab apples at a postal worker in her hometown of Moncton, N.B. A series of escalating events while incarcerated kept her behind bars and saw her transferred to nine different institutions in five provinces.
Falconer says Smith was simply a âtroubled teenâ who was facing an identity crisis.
âHer case is odd,â he said. âHer troubled status landed her in more and more serious segregation, and became a rational for cutting her off from the world.â
Smith said she didn't think a family should have to fight for five years to begin getting answers about her daughterâs tragic death.
âOne has to ask oneâs self how many families could actually get the attention of the prime minister to get correctional service to back off and to finally start answering questions,â Falconer said. âItâs not just been difficult losing their daughter, itâs been the process since 2007 of starting to get answers.
With files from The Canadian Press
