As Nathaniel clung to life, his parents asked if he’d survive. What they didn’t ask would soon be held against them

Neighbour Kathy Webster was tidying the McLellan home — kitchen clean-up and laundry — and fretting because of Nathaniel. The little boy was in hospital, mom and dad at his bedside. Nobody seemed to know what had happened, other than that the boy collapsed at a Strathroy home daycare and his mom had rushed him to the local hospital. Paramedics had transported him to a better equipped hospital in London and he was on life support.

A police officer knocked on the McLellan farmhouse door and told Kathy to leave. Police wanted to have a look around. “Why?” she asked.

“It’s just routine,” the officer told her.

Kathy does not recall being shown any paperwork, hearing the words “search warrant,” or the name of the police force or any of the officers present. Webster did what she was told and left. She walked across the hard-packed gravel to her own house, the last two properties on the dead-end country road.

In London, a half-hour drive away, doctors at the London Health Sciences Centre’s Pediatric Critical Care Unit had the results of a CT scan, electronic images from a series of cross-sectional X-rays on Nathaniel’s head. The scan discovered severe trauma, the result of some sort of violent impact. Though there was no visible mark under the boy’s wispy blond hair, the scan had revealed a nine-centimetre vertical crack in the back of his skull. There was also a bruise forming on the front left temple, which doctors theorized could be related. The scan also found evidence of “whiplash” — stretched ligaments — in his neck, which could be an indication the young boy had been shaken.

When the injury or injuries had occurred was unknown, and that mystery would become a matter of intense scrutiny in the days to come.

What the doctors did know was that as a result of some sort of impact, blood had flooded the majority of Nathaniel’s brain; the internal pressure was immense. Doctors were struggling to relieve the pressure, though it seemed futile. Nathaniel’s brain stem, which controls messages from the brain to the body, was severely damaged. He was on life support, a ventilator tube down his throat, wires stretching from his body to monitor panels in the intensive care unit.

Wednesday, the day the police first showed up at the McLellan home, was one of Kathy Webster’s regular days to do housekeeping chores. Normally, she also looked after Nathaniel on Wednesdays, part of a daycare plan cobbled together by parents Kent and Rose-Anne. The three older boys were in school. With no Nathaniel to chase after, Kathy busied herself cleaning and waited for news from London. As Rose-Anne often said, commenting on the lives of two working parents and four active boys, Kathy made their “house a home.”

The typical mess of a busy household was evident when Kathy let herself in earlier that day: breakfast dishes to wash, high chair to wipe. Nobody had been home the night before. Nathaniel’s parents were at the hospital, and his three older brothers were temporarily living with Grandpa and Grandma up the road. Kathy’s thoughts turned to Nathaniel while she tidied. She was very close to the family. When Nathaniel’s dad, Kent, was little, Kathy had been his babysitter in the same house.

“Nathaniel? Cute to the core,” Kathy told me in a later interview. “He was a little monkey. He was the type that when you picked him up his arms went around your neck, his legs wrapped around you. Then he would lay his head on your shoulder. He was so curious, always wanted to investigate, to check things out.”

That something like this had happened to Nathaniel was beyond Kathy’s comprehension.

Grasping at pieces of information she had heard in the last 24 hours, Kathy recalls wondering why Rose-Anne had been the one to take the little boy to hospital: “Why did the babysitter at the home daycare not call 911?”

The arrival of police at the McLellan home that Wednesday was an early sign of a growing suspicion directed at the parents, Rose-Anne and Kent. In what has the appearance of a tunnel-vision approach to policing, the suspicion began the day before with observations made by the hospital staff treating Nathaniel, first in Strathroy and then in London. These observations were passed to Strathroy-Caradoc police officers and a children’s aid worker, both called in by the hospital.

As can sometimes happen in a police investigation, one recollection builds upon the other, adding up to presumed guilt. Eventually, the Ontario Provincial Police would join in, echoing similar themes in their probe. The comments and observations of doctors, nurses and social workers are contained in search warrant applications police made related to Nathaniel’s case. A Star reporter went to court to unseal the warrants.

In Strathroy, nurse manager Kim Jenkins provided police with a series of observations and interactions with Rose-Anne and Kent that she found odd.

Nurse Jenkins said that when Rose-Anne and Kent were in the hospital “quiet room” with Kent’s parents, she overheard Rose-Anne say to Kent: “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I could have done better. I’m the one that picked the babysitter. I took too long picking (Nathaniel) up to bring him here.”

Nurse Jenkins also told police she found odd the lack of discussion among the parents and grandparents (Kent’s parents had rushed to the hospital when they heard about Nathaniel) in the quiet room “about how this happened.” When she witnessed the chief ER doctor detailing the extent of the injury to the parents, telling them Nathaniel could die, Nurse Jenkins noted Rose-Anne and Kent never asked “how did this happen” or “how could he be injured so badly.”

She also noted that she witnessed the grandparents trying to get Rose-Anne to see her son in Bed 6, where doctors were working on him. Kent, the nurse said, defended his wife’s decision, saying “she doesn’t want to see Nate right now.” Nurse Jenkins said both parents eventually went to see Nathaniel shortly before he was transferred, but she noted they stood on either side of the bed. Rose-Anne then kissed her son and held his fingers, the nurse reported to police.

At the London Health Sciences hospital, similar observations from staff were passed on to police. By that time, other family members had rushed to the hospital to provide support, including Rose-Anne’s father and stepmother and Rose-Anne’s siblings.

Dr. David Warren, the London hospital’s medical director of child protection services, had been asked to speak to Rose-Anne and Kent at the hospital in an attempt to get a description of how Nathaniel had been feeling that Tuesday morning, and if he had a history of “falls and tumbles.” Dr. Warren told police “it was very strange that no one asked how did this happen.” He said Rose-Anne commented: “I don’t care how, I just want to know if he is going to live.” Dr. Warren also told police that whatever happened to Nathaniel was “not accidental.”

A children’s aid worker, Jen Guthrie, reported to police on her conversations with Dr. Warren. Guthrie said Dr. Warren told her that intensive care unit staff in London noted that their “interactions with mom were bizarre.”

The police documents note that a London hospital social worker, Sue MacLean, said that Rose-Anne and Kent’s behaviour differed from other families in difficult situations. She recalled “that they were not overly curious about what happened.” She saw no “heightened emotion” and “neither one expressed anger.” But, noting that the family was Catholic (one nurse reported to police she saw Rose-Anne kneeling and praying in the hospital waiting room), MacLean told police that their faith may have given them better “coping abilities.” In its investigation, the Star has found that some people interviewed by police believe their words were taken out of context. MacLean is one of them, sources say.

With growing suspicions, as parents kept a sombre vigil at Nathaniel’s bedside in London, police made two trips down the country road to search the family’s home in Parkhill. At the time, one side of the house was a bit of a construction minefield, which attracted the attention of police, who speculated that Nathaniel may have fallen there. The McLellans had hired contractors to build an addition, expanding bedrooms, adding a foyer and garage. In late October of 2015, around the time Nathaniel went to hospital, the foundations for the addition had been poured.

The first visit to the McLellan home by police that week was the day after Nathaniel went to hospital — Wednesday night. That is when officers asked housekeeper Kathy Webster, who was cleaning and tidying, to leave. Grandpa Wayne, Kent’s dad, who was looking after the other McLellan children up the road, saw the officers that evening when he tried to collect some fresh clothes for his grandchildren. An officer told him he could not go into the house and to come back later that night, which he did. In documents related to a review of their activities, Strathroy police officers have denied they visited the home Wednesday night, but Kathy and Wayne are adamant they saw officers there that evening. No warrant was produced.

It was dark when Wayne went back — the officers were gone and there were no lights on in the house. Wayne asked Kathy to walk over and help him as she was more likely to know what the boys needed. They used a flashlight to find their way to the light switches inside the front door. Fresh clothes for the boys in hand, Wayne returned to his home, a few hundred metres away. He and Grandma Judy put on a brave face for Nathaniel’s older brothers, though the news from the hospital was not good.

The next day, Thursday, not long after the school bus dropped off the other three McLellan boys, the police came back. The lead officer stopped in at Grandpa Wayne’s house and introduced himself. “Staff Sgt. Gilles Philion, Strathroy-Caradoc Police.” With him was Det.-Const. Chris Haskett and Jen Guthrie, the children’s aid worker assigned to the case. She was the one who had earlier told police that she had learned that intensive care unit staff noted their interactions with Rose-Anne had been “bizarre.”

Philion was the officer who interviewed Rose-Anne and Kent at the London hospital the day before, asking Kent if he had an insurance policy on their son, and whether he owned an all-terrain vehicle. Those questions startled Kent. Yes, he had an all-terrain vehicle, he said. No, he did not have a life insurance policy on their son.

Philion arrived at this investigation at a time when another local child death case was just entering courts, one that had shaken the officers who worked the case. He and some of the other officers who investigated Nathaniel’s death had also worked on what became known as the Baby Ryker probe — the case of a 20-month-old boy scalded by hot coffee and left untreated for days to the point he died. The boy’s mother and ex-boyfriend, who lived a short distance from the school where Rose-Anne taught, were later convicted of criminal negligence causing death and failing to provide the necessaries of life.

When Philion, a tall man, balding, with a thick, neatly-trimmed moustache, knocked and entered the grandparents’ home, he had just come from searching the McLellan residence up the road, the second search by police officers in two days. Philion maintains he had Kent’s consent to search. No search warrant was obtained for either search.

Grandma Judy was making spaghetti when Philion came into the kitchen. She was recovering from a massive stroke three years before, but improving. Philion explained his plan was to conduct interviews of Wayne, Judy and the three boys. He would speak to Wayne and Judy upstairs, while Det.-Const. Haskett and Guthrie, the children’s aid worker, conducted videotaped, individual interviews of the three boys in the basement. The three McLellan brothers, Gabe, 10, Luke, 8, and Noah, 6, were told by the police to wait until a camera downstairs was set up.

Staff Sgt. Philion took Grandpa Wayne into a bedroom for his interview.

“How are things down there?” Philion asked, gesturing in the direction of Kent and Rose-Anne’s home at the end of the road. “Any history of the parents being rough with the kids? Anything amiss down there?”

Wayne was taken aback by the questions. “No. Everything is fine,” he said. His daughter-in-law and Kent had always wanted five children. Nathaniel was the fourth boy, Rose-Anne was pregnant with a fifth child. Busy though they were, it was an idyllic country life. Instead of watching television or playing video games, the boys played outside.

“They have no stresses in life,” Wayne told the detective, according to the detective’s notes, obtained by the Star through a court action. “We are a pretty close-knit family.”

Wayne told Philion his 70th birthday party had been at a local banquet hall the previous weekend. The McLellan family has deep roots in the small farming community of Parkhill (Wayne had been a football referee, pig farmer, planted cash crops, owned an appliance repair business and a 150-seat restaurant) and the party was well attended. Everyone, including Nathaniel, was in fine form, he told Philion.

“Nathaniel was in his glory. Everybody fawned over him. He was so cute, just running around and having fun,” Wayne recalled to me, doing his best to reconstruct his interview with Sgt. Philion. (Police have refused to release audio or videotapes related to their investigation.) Grandpa Wayne had a particular connection with Nathaniel, whose middle name was Wayne. All he had to do was show the 15-month-old a soccer ball and they would head outdoors and kick it around. “When I gave my speech (at the birthday party) he was in my arms. I was holding him. It was just a good day.”

The interviews with Wayne and Judy done, Staff Sgt. Philion had a bowl of Judy’s spaghetti.

Det.-Const. Haskett called up from the basement that he was ready. Neither the detective nor the children’s aid worker told the grandparents that an adult could be present for the interviews with the three boys. These interviews took place roughly 36 hours after their little brother had been rushed to hospital. Their grandparents had shared only the barest details of their brother’s condition but the boys knew something was terribly wrong.

Normally, as part of the cobbled-together child-care arrangements in the McLellan family, the boys got off the school bus and walked the long road through the cornfield to their grandparents’ home, staying until their mom or dad was home from work. The day Nathaniel went to hospital, their grandparents were waiting at the bus stop. “That only happens on special occasions, Gabe recalled in a later interview. “We had chicken nuggets from Burger King. We were wondering where Mom and Dad were and they said Nate hurt himself. We watched TV a bit and talked a bit.”

The account of the police interviews below is based on the detective’s notes, contained in search warrant documents used to obtain information (cellphone, internet, medical and other records) from the McLellan family.

Gabe, 10, the eldest, went down to the basement first. He told Detective Haskett he did not know what had happened to his little brother, only that he was in a coma. Luke, 8, told the detective he did not know how “Nathaniel cracked his skull” and it “happened at the babysitter’s.” Luke was asked if Nathaniel liked to climb. Luke told the officer, according to the officer’s notes, that “Nathaniel knows how to climb on to the table. He did it last week, on the weekend … Mom got him off the table.”

Noah, 6, told two stories, according to the detective’s notes. First, that “Nathaniel fell on hard cement at the babysitter’s and fell and cracked his skull.” Second, that a “long time ago” Nathaniel fell back on the wood floor and “hit his head.” Noah would later complain to his parents (and to me) that the detective was “pushing” him to say Nathaniel fell and injured himself at home.

The two younger boys, Luke and Noah, said the information they related to police about the injury came from their grandparents, and Noah added the detail that Grandpa Wayne received his information from Rose-Anne.

Shortly after the police and the social worker packed up their recording equipment and left, Kent called. Wayne answered.

“Dad, bring the boys. Nate’s not going to make it.”

Next: Part Three — The Case