Family of immigration detainee who died in jail still waiting for answers

Five months after receiving a curt phone call from a Milton jail telling him his wife was dead, Herb Gratton still doesn’t know what actually happened to her.

None of the authorities involved — not the jail, not the coroner and not the Canada Border Services Agency, which was holding his wife as an immigration detainee — has told him how the woman with whom he had shared his life for more than 30 years came to be “found in medical distress” in her cell and pronounced dead “shortly thereafter.”
The lack of information has been unsettling for Gratton, who says the fog around his wife’s final moments has left him with “an open wound.”
“I just want answers, you know?” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out what happened.”
Teresa Michelle Gratton, a 50-year-old grandmother, died Oct. 30 at the maximum-security Vanier Centre for Women, where she was being indefinitely detained — not because she was criminally charged or sentenced, but because Canada’s border police, the CBSA, wanted to deport her, and they believed she would not show up for her immigration hearing.
In the absence of information from government officials, two women who were incarcerated alongside Gratton have come forward with their recollections from the night she died. They say jail guards were slow to respond to distress calls from within Gratton’s cell. One of them believes the jail’s medical staff may have wrongly administered Gratton’s pain medication.
“It was all very heart-wrenching to see that it wasn’t taken as seriously as it should have been,” said Sherry Champagne, who befriended Gratton during the few weeks they spent locked up together.
Gratton, a U.S. citizen and permanent resident of Canada, had lived in Ontario for more than 13 years. Her husband and three adult children are all Canadian citizens. The bubbly, chatty woman, called “Mama” and “Ms. T” by younger inmates, suffered from chronic pain and was dependent on the prescription opioid hydromorphone. She also took medication for depression and anxiety.
The CBSA wanted to strip her permanent residency for “serious criminality,” based on criminal convictions in 2013, when she pleaded guilty to “being unlawfully in a dwelling-house” and forging a former employer’s signature on cheques for amounts ranging from $100 to $250. (Gratton admitted she forged the signatures, but said the man, who has since died, owed her the money and had given her keys to his house.) She was given a nine-month conditional sentence, which included six months of house arrest, but no jail time.
Later that year the CBSA issued a warrant for Gratton’s arrest, but they didn’t exercise it until September of last year, when Gratton was arrested for shoplifting at Walmart. She pleaded guilty and was sentenced to one day in jail, plus the 23 she spent in pretrial custody. Gratton was then transferred from the Elgin-Middlesex Detention Centre in London, where her family lives, to the Vanier Centre in Milton, 150 kilometres away, where she was placed on an indefinite immigration hold.
The most time Gratton ever spent in custody was the one month she was in immigration detention.
Herb Gratton says the only information he has received about his wife’s death came from the coroner, Dr. Ivan Hunter, with whom he left multiple messages before he received a call back. Gratton says Hunter told him if he “had to guess,” his wife probably died as a result of a methadone overdose. Gratton said he tried to ask more questions but got nowhere. “He told me he didn’t have the autopsy report in front of him. Why would you call me back without having the report in front of you?”
In the near-daily letters Gratton wrote her husband from jail, she complained of the agony of her withdrawal symptoms and how the jail’s medical staff had initially withheld her prescription painkillers and then dramatically reduced the dosage. Herb Gratton now wonders if the jail provided the fatal overdose. “How did she get an overdose of methadone, if that is the case?”
Hunter could not be reached for comment and a spokeswoman for the Office of the Chief Coroner said he would not be made available for an interview. The spokeswoman said the coroner continues to investigate Gratton’s death.
The two women who were in jail with Gratton, including her cellmate, told a different story than what appears in CBSA’s six-sentence news release about the death.
The Star agreed not to identify Gratton’s cellmate, because the woman feared repercussions at her job. The Star independently verified the woman had been incarcerated at the Vanier Centre for Women at the time of Gratton’s death; confirmed that her lawyer, Knia Singh, heard her account of the death in its immediate aftermath; and confirmed with Champagne, who was in a different cell on the same unit, that the woman was sharing Gratton’s cell the night the elder woman died. The two women’s stories align in key areas.
They say jail guards were slow to respond to repeated distress calls from Gratton’s cell and that Gratton appeared dead when paramedics eventually arrived. The CBSA’s official account said Gratton “passed away” after she was taken to hospital.
“I know they’re lying,” said Gratton’s cellmate, who pressed the cell’s emergency button multiple times.
The cellmate said they were locked down at around 8 p.m. and there was nothing unusual about Gratton’s appearance or demeanour. “She was happy,” the woman said, adding that Gratton’s canteen order had been delivered the day before. “She was cleaning, she was singing. She was like, ‘I got my Jolly Ranchers.’”
The cell in the overcrowded jail had just one bed, where Gratton slept. The other woman slept on a mattress on the floor, a couple of feet away. With the lights not yet dimmed for the night, the woman said she dozed off while Gratton was sitting on her bed, writing to her husband.
The woman said she woke up about an hour later because Gratton was snoring. “She was sitting on the bed, cross-legged, but she was slumped over. I shook her and said, ‘Why don’t you lay down?’ She said, ‘I wasn’t sleeping. I was praying.’ I turned back around and I fell asleep again.”
There are no clocks in the cells, though the woman estimates she woke again after midnight, likely around 12:30 a.m. That’s when she noticed Gratton sitting on the edge of the bed, her body slumped all the way forward and her hands touching the floor. The woman knew right away something was wrong. She reached over and tried to shake Gratton awake, but Gratton didn’t respond. “I got off the mattress and went to the emergency button.”
The small, silver button near the door of the cell is the only way for inmates to alert jail staff, the woman said.
She pressed the button three or four times. A guard showed up between five and 10 minutes after she pressed the button the first time, the woman said. She believes the guard was doing his usual rounds — not responding to her distress call — because she had to get his attention as he passed and he didn’t seem to be heading directly to their cell. “He said, ‘What’s wrong?’ I said, ‘She’s not moving.’”
The guard asked for Gratton’s name and then yelled it through the slot in the door through which meals are served. When Gratton didn’t respond, the guard radioed for a nurse. The cellmate, who had been in custody on firearms charges but is now out on bail, estimates that between 20 and 30 minutes passed from when she first pressed the emergency button and when the nurse opened the cell.
Gratton’s legs were stuck in a seated position, bent at the knee, when the nurse and guard tried to lift her back toward the bed, the woman said. “Her whole body rocked right back,” she said. “That’s when they started moving faster. There was more urgency in their voices.”
The woman was moved to another cell. About 10 to 15 minutes later paramedics arrived, she said.
Meanwhile, Champagne was still up, reading, several cells down the hall. She knew that somebody in her unit had pushed the emergency button because she could see the guards’ observation booth — known as “the bubble” — from her cell and she saw a light go off. “If any one of us pushes the buzzer, you see action in the bubble,” she said.
She watched the guard in the observation booth pick up a phone and call the post on the floor of the unit, where another guard is typically stationed. But Champagne said she could see the guard was not there. She watched the phone ringing for more than 10 minutes before a guard from another wing picked it up.
Champagne, a 42-year-old house cleaner who was in jail for breaching her probation, said it was not unusual for an inmate’s emergency call to go unanswered for several minutes. “Sometimes it takes 45 minutes,” she said. “I’m not exaggerating.”
Like Gratton’s cellmate, Champagne said Gratton’s body was stiff when paramedics pulled her out of the cell. “Her arms were pushed down, but her legs were at a 90-degree angle,” she said.
The Star sent questions to Ontario’s Ministry of Community Safety and Correctional Services, asking about the night Gratton died, how methadone is administered in the jail and the jail’s procedures for when the emergency button is pressed.
Spokesperson Andrew Morrison did not directly address any of the questions about Gratton’s death, citing ongoing investigations. “Correctional staff are trained in first aid and are supported by on-site medical staff,” he wrote in an email. “When an inmate calls for assistance or appears in medical distress, correctional staff respond as quickly as possible.”
Champagne says the guards showed little urgency to attend to Gratton.
Champagne said Gratton told her she had received her first dose of methadone on the morning of Oct. 29, roughly 15 hours before paramedics wheeled her body out of the jail. In a letter to her husband dated Oct. 27, Gratton suggests she was about to start methadone treatment: “The Doctor told me if a Methidone (sic) Clinic in London will take me she will start me on Methidone (sic) so I’m glad of that,” she wrote.
Champagne said Gratton also confided that she had consumed some “brew” — illicit alcohol made by inmates. Mixing alcohol and methadone can be fatal and is most dangerous at the start of treatment, according to the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health.
Aside from his brief phone call with the coroner, Gratton says no other government official has reached out to him with any information. “They don’t seem to want to talk to me. I don’t know why,” he said.
The Star first reported on Gratton’s death in December and followed up with government authorities again for this story. Federal Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale, whose ministry is responsible for the Canada Border Services Agency; CBSA president John Ossowski; and Ontario’s minister of community safety and correctional services, Marie-France Lalonde, all declined interview requests. Their departments would not answer any specific questions about Gratton’s case, citing privacy legislation and ongoing investigations.
In a short statement to the Star, Lalonde said that in addition to the coroner’s investigation, the ministry is also in the midst of conducting its own probe. If the coroner determines the death was not due to natural causes, an inquest will be held, she said.
“My most sincere condolences go out to the family and friends of Theresa Gratton,” the statement said, misspelling Gratton’s first name. “I take my responsibly (sic) to improve the conditions in our system, and to ensure the safety of our staff and inmates, very seriously.”
Herb Gratton says neither Lalonde nor anyone from her office has contacted him.

Brendan Kennedy
Toronto Star
Mar 30, 2018