Moms who starved boy ‘only ones responsible’ for death, Crown charges

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A month before the emaciated skeleton of a boy ultimately died, his two moms worried he was near death and they were going to jail.

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The 12-year-old boy was shivering uncontrollably, he was acting “drunk,” his eyes were “wonky,” he couldn’t speak intelligible English and he couldn’t stand up.

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“But you still didn’t call 911?” asked Crown attorney Kelli Frew, professionally hiding the disgust the rest of us were feeling in the courtroom Friday.

“No, miss,” replied an emotionless Becky Hamber.

“And you still didn’t take him to the hospital?” Frew asked.

“No, miss,” Hamber repeated with exhaustion.

“I’m going to suggest to you that you couldn’t call 911 or take (him) to the hospital because they would see what you and your wife had basically done to this child, right?” pressed the prosecutor. “And if he was still conscious and alive, he would tell as well how he had been forced to live, right?”

If only they had – because just a month later, that poor boy would be dead.

It was the third and final day of her gruelling cross examination where Hamber, 46, and wife Brandy Cooney, 44, have pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder in the death of the 12-year-old boy and assault and not providing the necessities of life to his younger brother.

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The boys – whose identities are protected by a publication ban – came to live with the couple in 2017 with the plan that they’d be adopted. When the older brother was found unresponsive on the floor of his cold, sparse basement bedroom on the night of Dec. 21, 2022, he was soaking wet in a wetsuit and weighed the same as he had at the age of six.

Frew suggested this was a rerun of the death scare they’d experienced on Nov. 20 when Hamber’s frightened wife texted that the child wasn’t speaking English and his eyes couldn’t focus.

“Unfortunately, my thoughts are he is suddenly going to die and I’m going to jail,” Cooney told her.

Hamber blamed the boy’s “binge eating disorder” and “rumination syndrome” – conditions no professional had ever validated – and suggested he was faking.

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Their local hospital was only a seven-minute drive away. Instead, Hamber Googled “hypothermia” where the first piece of advice, Frew suggested, is to seek medical help.

Even Superior Court Justice Clayton Conlan interrupted the Crown’s line of questioning to basically tell her not to waste her time on this area, that it’s a “non-controversial point” that Hamber’s evidence is that she was repeatedly told by the psychiatrist to go to the hospital in a time of crisis.

“If that evidence is accepted,” the judge said, “there’s no way to describe this incident other than a crisis.”

Within a day of fearing he was going to die, Frew said the boy was back restrained in his zip-tied wetsuit, and forced to do stair climbs. On his final night, he was locked in his cold room and as punishment, they’d taken away his blanket again and replaced it with just a towel.

Hamber was cleaning up from dinner when Cooney called out in panic and she rushed down to see the unresponsive boy in a pool of “liquid.”

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“I’m going to suggest that it’s once you go down and realize that we’re having a repeat of Nov. 20, that’s when you get the heater out and put the heater outside of his room. That’s when you turn the heat up inside the house and that’s when you take (him) and you put them in warm water. And I’m going to suggest it was the hot tub this time.”

Hamber hotly denied it all.

“On Nov. 20, you knew at that point that the way you had been treating this child – starving him, dehydrating him, isolating him from everyone in the cold basement with nothing but a wetsuit – this would lead to this little child’s death, didn’t you?” Frew demanded.

“No, miss,” Hamber replied.

“And on Dec. 21, that’s precisely what happened, wasn’t it? And you and your wife tried to revive him by putting him in warm water, didn’t you?”

Hamber again denied putting him in water or using the toboggan police found in his room to then bring him downstairs when it didn’t revive him.

“It was then that you start to really panic because you now have to call 911, right?” Frew charged. “You have to show the outside world what you’ve done to this child, right?”

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If she wasn’t closing the hot tub cover before first responders came, why was she calling 911 from outside?

Hamber insisted she wasn’t – but then the prosecutor played the tape of her call.

“We can’t resus(citate) him,” she told the operator after apologizing for the neighbours’ dogs barking outside. “We can’t wake him up.”

She needed air so she wouldn’t go into anaphylactic shock, she explained weakly.

Frew concluded by accusing Hamber of blaming everyone else – from Children’s Aid, to the boy’s doctors and therapists.

“I’m going to suggest to you that the only ones responsible for (his) death are the ones who are starving and keeping him captive in that basement. Do you agree?”

“I do not agree,” Hamber retorted.

Closing submissions in this marathon judge-alone trial are scheduled for March 23.

mmandel@postmedia.com

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