Toronto

An adorable toddler is dead — and all the warning signs were there.

In a College Park courtroom, the couple slinks in, handcuffed, not looking at each other.

Marleny Cruz is a scrawny wisp of a woman, the 25-year-old’s tiny frame lost in a maroon Texas A&M sweatshirt and baggy grey sweatpants. Moving as if in a trance, she is directed into the prisoner’s box and stares straight ahead.

Boyfriend Joel France, 36, is dressed in a prison-issue white jumpsuit, cocky and far more animated as he scans the windowless room for relatives.

Both are charged with second-degree murder in the death of her 26-month-old son, Nicholas. France is also charged with assaulting Cruz.

The couple brought Nicholas to Toronto Western Hospital on Sunday afternoon. “The boy was unconscious,” reports a witness who didn’t want his name used. “His father was holding him in his arms, and they were running frantically with the mother screaming, ‘I found him in bed, he is not breathing!’ His body looked limp and lifeless.”

He later saw them being escorted out of the emergency room by two police officers. “The mother was a couple steps behind, holding a large tissue in her hand, sobbing. She looked despondent, but by no means hysterical or anything like that. The father was very calm.”

Police said there is evidence the child had suffered chronic injuries, with trauma to his abdomen.

France’s lawyer, Nathan Gorham, asks that the matter be put over until Aug. 6 when his client can appear via videolink from jail. “I haven’t had a chance to speak with him yet,” he later says outside the court where a publication ban has been imposed on the evidence. “I can imagine he’s shaken, he’s charged with second-degree murder.”

Cruz has no one yet to represent her so duty counsel steps in. She, too, will remain in custody and return by video July 23. The couple is ordered not to communicate with each other — but they haven’t even exchanged a glance.

Her neighbours say this was a new romance, that France had only moved into her townhome recently. With Cruz’s stormy history with a previous violent boyfriend, the question is simple — wasn’t anyone keeping tabs on that poor child?

Cruz was obviously a young mother on their radar — whether it be that of the Children’s Aid or the Catholic CAS. There seems to be no sign of her other two children — had she lost custody because of her past? In 2009, Toronto Police asked for help in finding her when she was six-months-pregnant and went missing from the Dawes Rd.-Victoria Park Ave. area with her three-year-old son, Juan Cruz.

The following year, she vanished again. This time, Cruz was last seen in the company of her boyfriend Jonathan Eli Donaldson, who was wanted for allegedly assaulting her following a vicious argument. Toronto Police feared she’d been kidnapped by Donaldson, who had recently served 15 months in jail for assault. News reports said he was the father of her one-year-old son — the boy she’d been carrying when she went missing in 2009 — and that she had another young child as well.

Cruz’s mom told CBC News at the time that she wasn’t surprised when police told her that her daughter had disappeared with Donaldson. “We figured that one of these days, we would have a knock on the door,” Carol de la Cruz said three years ago. “It was either going to be — she was in trouble again or … we had a feeling she might have gone back to him or she was dead.”

Well, there is no doubt that she’s in deep trouble now — as is this latest boyfriend.

A young mother with an unstable past and a seeming weakness for violent beaus — surely all the danger signs were written in neon for those who are supposed to be looking out for our most vulnerable kids.

Instead, a sweet-faced little boy is dead.