Jeffery Baldwin (second from right) is shown in a coroner's inquest photo. A Toronto woman and her husband who starved their five-year-old grandson to death had subjected two of the woman's children to "eerily similar" abuse more than two decades earlier, an inquest heard Wednesday.The Canadian Press
An inquest into the starvation death of a five-year-old boy at the hands of his grandparents is hearing that the other children in the house were told to call him a pig.
Jeffrey Baldwin was starved to death in 2002 by his grandparents — Elva Bottineau and Norman Kidman — who gained custody of the boy and his three siblings despite the fact both of them had previous convictions for child abuse.
The coroner's inquest into Jeffrey's death is watching video statements today from Jeffrey's siblings about the abuse he suffered.
Jeffrey's eldest sister can be seen telling police that Bottineau taught her and her other brother not to like Jeffrey and her other sister.
She says Jeffrey and the other sister were only allowed out of their bedroom for meals and even then they had to stand in what she called the "pig corner."
The girl says Jeffrey and the other sister were locked in their room at night so they had to urinate and defecate in there.
"They were called pigs," the girl says on the video interview from March 2003. The police officer asks her why.
"Just cause they were bad in every single way...My grandma always had to clean up their bedroom, they had to, she had to clean up the poo and it stinked in there and it's like a pig pen."
A pediatric nutritionist told the coroner's inquest Wednesday that when Jeffrey died in November 2002 he weighed just 21 pounds — less than he did on his first birthday.
Dr. Stanley Zlotkin examined Jeffrey's case and told the inquest that in all his years of research in Third World countries he had never seen a child so malnourished and stunted.
Pathologist Dr. Gregory Wilson told the inquest Jeffrey would have "suffered greatly" as he died.