Teen who died of drug overdose in custody was 'begging for his life,' Saskatoon inquest hears

A youth worker testifying at a coroner's inquest described, in harrowing detail, watching a Saskatoon teenager suffer a fatal overdose while begging for an ambulance inside his cell at Kilburn Hall Youth Centre.

"His body started at one point shaking. He was on the floor flopping around," Angela Silva, a youth facility worker testified Wednesday at the coroner's inquest into the teen's death. 

"He was begging for his life. He was begging for an ambulance."

The 17-year-old boy cannot be named because of provisions in the Youth Criminal Justice Act. The teen had been arrested on July 25, 2015 for allegedly breaching a community supervision order.

The coroner's inquest heard earlier that the teen smuggled methamphetamine into the centre and that he died of an overdose five days later, on July 30.

During the emotional testimony, Silva said she asked her supervisor to call an ambulance at least eight times. It was at least two hours before emergency services were called and the teen was taken to hospital, where he later died. 

She testified that her supervisors, based on the opinion of a nurse who was contacted by phone, did not believe the boy was overdosing. Instead, she said, they were under the impression he was going through withdrawals. 

Teen asked to go to hospital: supervisor

One of those supervisors, Dale Larocque, also testified during the inquest Wednesday.

Larocque, who did not have training in detecting an overdose, said the youth didn't ask for an ambulance but did ask to go to a hospital.

Larocque said the nurse he called told him to look for tell-tale signs of a drug overdose — blue lips, slurring of words, frothing at the side of the mouth — but said that the youth showed none of those symptoms.

"Based on what the nurse told us and based on what I was seeing, I wasn't keen on sending anybody into the room," said Larocque. "He wasn't articulating to me anything that would indicate he was having an overdose."

To Larocque, it looked like the teen was coming off of "heavy drug use," noting how the teen was scratching his arms.

The teen was given a pat-down search, but not a strip or cavity search, when he was admitted to Kilburn, added Larocque.

Teen 'agitated' before death, admitted to taking meth

Silva, the youth worker, said the teen admitted to her that he had taken two grams of meth while inside the youth jail. Less than a half hour later, she said, he began to overdose. 

"He was agitated, he was pacing ... he right away said 'Ang, you have to believe me, I'm overdosing, I took too much,'" she recalled.

Silva says she wasn't allowed go against her supervisors' orders and call an ambulance herself. If she had called an ambulance, Silva said, she would have been fired. 

But Larocque said he was not aware of a policy forbidding workers to call 911.

Silva said she regrets not calling an ambulance and it is something she lives with to this day. Silva feels that not calling an ambulance was wrong. 

"Their freedoms are taken away, but their human rights should not be ... I feel like he was failed that night," she said. 

Eventually, another worker did call 911 without the permission of a supervisor, the coroner heard. 

Earlier testimony revealed that a close review of video footage taken from the police station, court cells and Kilburn Hall showed the teen apparently snorting or swallowing drugs while in custody.

Silva has not returned to work since the teen died. She said she is no longer going to work in the corrections industry because of the way the teen was treated.