KIMBER: Shirley Street Stand-Off

By Stephen Kimber
Halifax Daily News,
May 30, 2004

The recent 67-hour standoff between Halifax Regional Police and a couple who refused to hand their infant daughter over to the custody of the Children’s Aid Society showcased the former at its professional, level-headed best but has raised troubling questions about the role of the latter in controversial child protection cases.

Start with the police.

The police had little choice but to enforce a Jan. 15 apprehension order for Mona Clare VandenElsen, the then three-week-old daughter of Lawrence Finck and Carline VandenElsen. But when officers went to the family home in late January to get the child, VandenElsen had already disappeared with her daughter.

Police learned earlier this month that the mother and child had returned to Halifax, so officers were dispatched to the house again at midnight on Wed., May 19. Though one can certainly question the wisdom of trying to serve such an order in the middle of the night, the police were legitimately concerned — based on their own experience in January as well as the couple’s track record in violating custody orders in previous relationships — that one of them might take off with the little girl again.
This time, however, the people inside the Shirley Street house refused the officers entry, barricaded the door and, at one point, when police tried to enter a second time, allegedly fired shots out the window.

That was the beginning of a tense two-and-a-half days of SWAT teams, neighbourhood evacuations and ongoing, seemingly never-ending negotiations. Punctuated at one point by a police robot improbably delivering diapers to the house and at another by the couple’s impromptu appearance on the home’s roof to denounce Children’s Aid and breastfeed the baby. But as Halifax Police Const. Kevin McLellan put it to reporters at one point during the siege: “As long as we’re talking… we are moving forward.”


The police were smart enough to recognize that this was not a situation that required the recklessness of Rambo so much as the patience of Job. On Friday night, their staying power was rewarded when the standoff ended two days and 15 hours after it began — bizarrely but without additional violence. (While Finck’s elderly mother, who was inside the home during the standoff, did die during the siege, officials say it was of natural causes.) We owe the police a debt of gratitude for the way they handled what could easily have turned into a horrible tragedy.

But, that said, what are we to make of the Children’s Aid Society’s decision to seek custody of the child in the first place?

The Society isn’t commenting on the specifics of the case so we’re left with more questions than answers, the most important of which is this: was this apprehension order really necessary?

There’s no question both Finck and VandenElsen have track records of violating court orders in child custody disputes.In 2000, Finck was convicted of abducting his four-year-old daughter from a previous marriage, and spent time in jail. That same year, VandenElsen fled to Mexico with the triplets from her first marriage because she was afraid she was about to lose all access to them. An Ontario court had already awarded custody of the children to her ex-husband and a decision on her own future access was pending. A jury later acquitted her on the abduction charges, accepting the defence argument that VandenElsen feared the children would be irreparably harmed if they lost all contact with their mother. That decision has since been overturned and a new trial ordered.

Reading between the lines of the clippings concerning those cases, neither Finck nor VandenElsen seem easy to like. “Ms VandenElsen” wrote one judge, “has chosen to perpetuate her fixation with her own victimization.” The judge in Finck’s case said he was “volatile and unpredictable… [and] has taken on the mantle of the obsessed and seems to have forsaken reason.”The one thing I didn’t find in any of those news stories, however, was any suggestion that either parent had deliberately harmed any of their children (except, of course, insofar as the custody battle itself represented a kind of harm to them.)

Parents involved in bitter child custody battles often feel like victims, often become obsessed and, occasionally, even do stupid things they believe to be in their children’s best interests..VandenElsen and Finck have certainly both done what appear to be irrational, perhaps even illegal things in what may have been misguided attempts to right what they see as wrongs being done to their children. The courts have, or are, dealing with those cases.

But does that mean VandenElsen and Finck represented such an imminent danger to Mona Claire that Children’s Aid had no choice but to swoop in and take their child from them?“When any court formally terminates a parent-child relationship, that is an event that is inevitably sad,” Mr. Justice Grant Campbell wrote last year in denying VandenElsen custody of her three older children. “A court must take such a drastic step in only the most extreme of cases.”

Was this really one of those cases?

Or, in this case, is Finck and VandenElsen’s “perceived victimization” more real than perceived?

Stephen Kimber