The baby was found face down on the floor of his parents’ bedroom. He had fallen to the left of his parents’ bed, after rolling. When his father found him, he was “blue”, we can read in the report, in a situation of asystole, that is to say in extreme cardiac arrest.
Efforts to resuscitate him, first by the father, then by the police officers who arrived on scene first after the call to emergency services, were in vain, although the maneuvers to bring him back to life were constant for and after transport between the parents’ home and Maria’s hospital.
This transport, carried out by the police, took only two minutes, we read in Coroner Chamberland’s report. Death was noted 46 minutes after the arrival of the police and the baby at the hospital, where resuscitation maneuvers, including intubation, were also carried out without interruption.
According to the framework presented in this report, the father returned from work at 2:03 p.m. on June 8. He left the house at 5:30 a.m. When he arrived, he did not see his son on the couch, where the baby was usually when the father returned. The latter did not see his son on the bed upstairs either. This was the parents’ bed, another place where the baby often slept.
The mother, after going upstairs, did not see the baby on the bed either and she asked her partner where the baby was. The father immediately went up to the room. He found the baby next to the bed, at a 90-degree angle, with his head close to the edge of the bed. It was then 2:20 p.m.
The autopsy performed on the remains revealed no trauma to the head or elsewhere. The baby was lying on a thick blanket which cushioned the shock of his fall. This fall was less than 19 inches, the height from the floor to the top of the mattress, since the thick blanket the baby was found on was crumpled.
“The height between the top of the mattress and the top of the blanket on the floor is only a few inches,” said the coroner.
The pathologist from the McGill University Health Center found no lesion or trauma explaining the death of the baby. “It states as the main diagnosis that it found no anatomical cause of death,” underlines coroner Chamberland. She classified the death as resulting from sudden death syndrome, “having no metabolic screening results.”
A neuro-pathologist also produced a report to conclude that there is no neuro-pathological cause of death in this case.
The coroner observed that on the day of the tragedy, the baby was not swaddled on his parents’ bed, and that no pillow or cushion was on either side of his body when he was seen there for the two last times by his mother, at noon for his bottle and around 1 p.m. when she came to see him again.
Questioned during the investigation following the death, the mother indicated that the baby, at four months old, was not yet turning. Jean-Pierre Chamberland writes that it “seems that that day, despite his age, the little […] turned, moved and fell off the bed.
Despite the father’s explanations that the blankets had left marks on the child’s face when he turned him from his face-down position, Coroner Chamberland concluded that it “cannot be said that the child is died of asphyxiation, despite the examinations carried out. The death therefore remains unexplained. The young child […] died of an unknown cause.
