A P.E.I. family's nightmare: 'Someone needs to be punished here'

CHARLOTTETOWN -- When the P.E.I. businessman arrived at the group home in Charlottetown to pick up his daughter, two solemn RCMP officers were waiting for him.

He immediately assumed his daughter was dead.

"In those few seconds, I visualized a pile of bloody rags on the road, which was her body run over by a truck," he said in a recent interview, his voice shaking.

The officers assured him the young woman was fine.

But his sense of relief fell away when the Mounties handcuffed him, saying she had accused him of sexually assaulting her.

"I said, 'Obviously, there's a mistake here, there's a communication problem,"' he said in a recent interview. "I knew it was false."

It was Feb. 7, 2015. For the next six months, he and his wife were effectively prohibited from seeing their daughter as they were drawn into a bizarre legal nightmare that pitted them against police, the P.E.I. Health Department and the group home.

The Canadian Press is not identifying the family because of the nature of the charges and the woman's vulnerable state. She has severe autism and the intellectual capacity of a two-year-old.

Independent testing -- later arranged by her family -- found the 35-year-old was incapable of making the allegations attributed to her.

The clinical psychologist who did the testing said it demonstrated that questions put to the woman were actually being answered by group home workers using a disputed method known as facilitated communication.

The father was never charged.

The case in P.E.I. is an echo of a disturbing trend that first appeared in the early 1990s, when there was a string of similar cases -- none of which resulted in a conviction.

A judge later concluded the P.E.I. Health Department and the group home acted in a "deplorable" manner by ignoring the couple's attempts to have their daughter's communication skills assessed.

The P.E.I. Supreme Court, in a decision released in March, found then-health minister Doug Currie failed in his legislated duty to conduct an investigation.

Currie did not respond to interview requests. The province's current health minister, Robert Henderson, issued a statement saying an internal review was underway.

Calls and emails to staff and management at the group home were not returned.

The woman's parents, who are speaking out for the first time, say those responsible for their agonizing ordeal should be held accountable for their actions. More importantly, they say they want to make sure no other family suffers a similar fate.

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Facilitated communication (FC) was among a long list of therapies the woman's parents used to help her communicate, though they had their doubts about its usefulness.

First introduced to North America in the early 1990s, FC was initially hailed as a breakthrough. The technique involves an aid holding the user's wrist, finger or arm as they point to letters or type on a keyboard.

Eastern Michigan University Prof. James Todd, a longtime critic of the technique, has stated that there are no cases in which FC has been shown, by proper scientific standards, to work.

Despite widespread skepticism within the scientific community, supporters of FC say the method works.

The Institute on Communication and Inclusion at Syracuse University in Upstate New York -- a leading force in the FC movement -- says problems with FC are typically caused by failure to adhere to best practices.

The institute, in a statement released last fall, said facilitators must be taught how to confirm authorship. As well, the institute stressed that FC is a training method used as a stepping stone to independent communication.

In the P.E.I. case, the young woman never reached that stage, even though she had used FC for years.

At age of 21, she moved in to a group home operated by Queens County Residential Services in Charlottetown, where her FC sessions started producing complex thoughts and feelings in recent years.

In 2013, the parents say they started complaining about deteriorating conditions at the group home, and they say they started hearing reports that their daughter was making inappropriate sexual comments through FC.

In the fall of 2014, they say they were stunned when they were told their daughter had apparently used FC to say she wanted to have sex with a group home worker.

According to court documents, in January 2015 a community living worker filed an internal report saying she had used FC to determine the woman had been hurting herself because: "My dad touches my private parts and I don't like it."

During a subsequent police interview, a staff facilitator told investigators the woman was spelling words on an alphabet board that indicated her father had sexually abused her since she was 13.

When the father was arrested days later, he denied abusing his daughter and insisted the allegations did not come from her.

"You are believing what you are hearing from a third party," he told police, according to a transcript of his interrogation.

The father was released, but he was told he would be charged later with sexual assault. He signed an undertaking saying he would refrain from contacting his daughter or anyone under the age of 18.

An RCMP spokeswoman said investigators sought advice from an expert, but Sgt. Leanne Butler declined to offer other details about the investigation, citing privacy concerns.

"We did everything we could as an investigative body," she said.

Dawn Frizzell, an adult protection worker, later filed an affidavit with the court saying the woman had indicated through FC that she did not want to take part in supervised visits with her mother at the group home.

"I believe that (the woman) is fearful of seeing her father and that she has concerns that she could be subject to further abuse," Frizzell said, adding that the woman said she wanted to make decisions for herself.

Between February and July of 2015, the woman's mother made repeated attempts to visit her, but the province and the group home resisted her attempts, court records show.

The family's lawyers reached out to leading experts to determine the woman's ability to communicate. But they, too, ran into a brick wall when dealing with the government and group home, the court decision says.

Finally, on June 10, 2015, clinical psychologist Dr. Adrienne Perry -- an expert on autism and developmental disabilities at York University in Toronto -- conducted a series of tests to determine the woman's communication abilities.

Perry, in a report prepared for the case, found the woman rarely looked at the alphabet board when she was receiving help from her main facilitator, group home worker Jennifer Hendricken.

At one point, the woman was shown a small figurine -- a pink pony -- while the facilitator was out of the room. When she returned, the woman was asked to use FC to describe what she had seen.

The first facilitated answer was: "I seen a picture of a ball," Perry's report says. Asked again, the answer was: "A picture of a kid." After the facilitator was told it was a pony, the woman was asked to describe its colour. The facilitated answer? "Black."

Other tests produced similar results.

"(She) is incapable of generating the communications that are being attributed to her," Perry concluded in her report. "Furthermore ... (the) answers are being generated by the facilitator."

Reached by phone, Hendricken declined a request for an interview, saying she had been told not to talk about the case.

However, in an affidavit filed with the court, Hendricken insisted that the woman could communicate through FC -- an opinion shared by three of her colleagues in similar affidavits.

"I do not point to the letters or symbols myself, rather (she) holds my hand and then she points herself to the letter or symbol with her index finger," the affidavit says.

"I believe that (the woman) has the ability to facilitate on her own; however, she has not done so and I believe has grown accustomed to holding someone's hand."

Hendricken said she was aware that the woman often looks away from the alphabet board when using FC, but she said the woman can still see the letters because of her strong peripheral vision.

As well, Hendricken cited examples of previously unknown information she had gleaned through FC that she said later proved to be accurate.

On June 26, 2015, a Crown attorney filed a stay of proceedings and the parents were reunited with their daughter in August 2015.

Earlier this year, the P.E.I. Supreme Court awarded the parents more than $61,000 in legal costs, saying that even cursory review of the studies on FC "would have alerted the minister of health to the very real possibility the communications of (the woman) were not her communications."

The court did not take a position on the validity of FC, but the decision clearly states that the technique did not work in this case.

Had the woman's caregivers or the health minister followed the legislation requiring an investigation, "it would have become clear very early on ... (the) communications were not the communications of (the woman) but were the communications of the facilitators," the decision says.

"Someone needs to be punished here," the father says. "There were people who didn't do their jobs."