Kimberly Rogers Inquest Alerts

The life and death of Kim Rogers
Was it suicide or an accident?
Witnesses debate welfare policies

by Kate Harries
Ontario Reporter
The Toronto Star
Dec. 7, 2002. 01:00 AM

SUDBURY—For her teachers and classmates at the Scarborough Centre for Alternative Studies, Kim Rogers was a shining example of a person trying to turn her life around.

"She was quick, she picked things up quickly, she tried hard," said Pam Petropoulos, one of the teachers at the adult high school.

Petropoulos was so impressed by Rogers that she chose her as one of the students to address the Royal Commission on Learning chaired by former Liberal health minister Monique Begin and New Democrat Gerry Caplan when it came to Scarborough in November, 1993.

"Kim talked about the value of continuing education and what it meant to her," Petropoulos told the Star. "Kim was one of those people that I hoped would drop by the school because I wanted to see what had become of her, because I had such high hopes for her."

But Rogers was found dead on Aug. 9, 2001, halfway through a six-month house arrest sentence for welfare fraud. She was 40 years old and eight months pregnant. After 30 days of testimony, a coroner's inquest into her death finished hearing evidence yesterday. Lawyers are to make their final submissions next week with the jury expected to bring down a verdict and recommendations Dec. 19.

Rogers, whose tragic end made her a poster girl for anti-poverty activists, has emerged as a complex character from the descriptions of witnesses. Bright, personable, hardworking, with a good sense of humour. And also moody, intensely private, and mortified by the publicity that followed her constitutional challenge of an Ontario government regulation terminating benefits for those convicted of fraud.

But she treasured the rare achievements in a troubled life where the first brush with authority came at age 15, proudly displaying her social services diploma on the wall of her home.

Janet McKay, director of the Guardian Angel group home for disabled children, was impressed when Rogers did a field placement there before graduating from Cambrian College in May 2000.

"She had a lot of gumption. She wasn't a clock-watcher. Her inter-personal communication skills were dynamic, " McKay testified. "Kim would have been a dynamic social worker."

Instead, an April, 2001 conviction for defrauding the welfare system of $13,500 sent Rogers into a downward spiral. The overpayment had occurred over three years while she attended Cambrian College and received a student loan totalling $33,000.

Witnesses, including her family doctor, have questioned whether she would have been able to survive on the student loan alone, as her ability to earn money each summer had been curtailed by repeated surgeries to a disabling knee injury suffered in 1997.

Rogers achieved notoriety after news of her sentence became public. Not because the sentence itself was viewed as harsh — Rogers herself was relieved she wasn't sent to jail — but because in 1999 the Progressive Conservative government added an extra penalty to a criminal conviction for welfare fraud: an automatic suspension of welfare benefits, for three months at the time of Rogers' offence, for life now. Her benefits were reinstated when her case was appealed.

These facts have made her death a potent marker in a debate about welfare policies.

Do the punitive measures introduced by the Tories serve their stated purpose, to protect the system for those who really need it and prevent taxpayer dollars from being wasted?

Or, as public interest groups have argued here, do they unfairly target the poor by making crimes out of survival strategies that are the last desperate resort of disadvantaged people?

The inquest has heard evidence that false reporting by an employment insurance recipient is dealt with administratively, through fines and restitution, and not through the courts, unless there's evidence of widespread collusion and large amounts of money.

Driving the debate is a mystery: did she kill herself or was the death accidental?

The evidence in favour of the suicide theory is the lethal level in her blood of the anti-depressant amitriptyline.

The pathologist, who determined that the eight-month fetus that died with her would have been a healthy baby girl, could not estimate the number of pills she took, but a nearby empty bottle should have contained around 80 50-mg tablets.

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`She said: ``This is my last shot. This is my last chance to show the world that I can be someone'''

Janet McKay, witness

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There's evidence she had been stockpiling the drug for three months, with the tacit assistance of her doctor, who was sympathetic to her fear of being left without medication if her welfare drug card was cut off again. She was being treated for migraines, anxiety, chronic pain and insomnia.

Witnesses speculated the extreme heat in her apartment could have been the suicidal trigger, or that she may have been overwhelmed by the hopelessness of her situation, including an imminent re-assessment of her eligibility.

The review would probably have uncovered undeclared assistance from her boyfriend and an unreported lowering of her rent by her landlord, promoting further cuts to her monthly cheque. That might have led to eviction, questioning whether she could care for the child.

On the other hand, amitriptyline is a drug that is associated with accidental overdoses and heat intolerance. The inquest has heard that 2,000 mg would have been the lethal dose for a person of Roger's weight, although individual tolerance varies and as little as 600 mg has been fatal. But if Rogers had taken as much as 80 pills, a granular deposit would have been expected in her stomach, and none was found.

For some, whether it was a suicide or accident is irrelevant. Groups like the Elizabeth Fry Society and the Ontario Social Safety Network consider the key issue to be whether it is acceptable to incarcerate a person without the means to pay for food and shelter.

The jury heard a full range of opinion on the legitimacy of the sentence imposed by Mr. Justice Greg Rodgers.

Local agency workers testified they were shocked that a person could be left both destitute and imprisoned. Others, involved in the justice system, have described the sentence as lenient, given the need to deter fraud from the public in a situation where the individual is relied on to self-report.

The judge's order confined her to her apartment except for religious and medical purposes, to report to her sentence supervisor, and to shop for the necessities of life.

At the request of crown attorney Alex Kurke, Rodgers restricted shopping to three hours a week on Wednesday mornings. At the request of defence lawyer Andrew Buttazoni, he gave the sentence supervisor discretion to allow other exceptions if warranted.

A transcript shows the judge and the two lawyers ascertained from a welfare worker in the courtroom that a conviction would trigger the three-month ban. Buttazoni informed the judge that his client would be able to get by with help from friends. No further information was sought or provided.

The day after her conviction, Rogers called the welfare department to report what had happened. She obviously still hadn't grasped that there would be no more help. "Client states that she is pregnant and requires on-going assistance," says the entry in the welfare department log.

Out of food and facing eviction, Rogers was down to the last fraying strands of the province's social safety net. Many generous people — some of them unpaid volunteers from Sudbury social agencies who dug into their own pockets — rallied to get her food and other necessities.

Sudbury Legal Clinic lawyer Grace Kurke, the wife of the prosecutor in the case, helped her launch a Charter of Rights challenge of the welfare ban. At the request of her doctor, Sudbury Social Services paid for a 3-month reinstatement of her drug card — to July 31 — and on May 31, a court restored her benefits, pending the appeal.

The welfare machine continued, however. A computer program named NORA (Numerically Ordered Ranking Assessment) threw up her name as "high risk" of violating Ontario Works rules because her rent of $450 a month was significantly higher that the maximum $325 shelter allowance.

Other high-risk "flags," include frequent changes of address and using some-one else's phone number as a contact.

NORA failed to disclose that Rogers was not receiving a $43 a month pregnancy diet supplement, a program her caseworker forgot to tell her about.

But as a result of the rental information, Rogers received a letter in mid-July telling her an appointment had been set up to review her file for Sept. 5, the day her baby was due. "Please note that this appointment cannot be rescheduled under any circumstances," the letter stated in bolded letters. "Failure to attend ... will result in your financial assistance being placed on hold or suspended."

Rogers was intent in getting through her sentence. As she told McKay of the Guardian Angel home, "I did the crime, I've got to do the time."

She was also looking forward to the birth of her baby, McKay testified. "She said, `This is my last shot. This is my last chance to show the world that I can be someone, that I can do something."

Rogers stuck to the letter of her sentence conditions, and never sought relief in the backyard of the house where she lived, even though that summer's heat-wave made her apartment nearly intolerable.