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VICTORIA — Not long before the end of his young life, Alex Gervais was placed in the Abbotsford hotel where he would live out his remaining days before throwing himself to his death out of a fourth-floor window.

Though far from proper accommodation for a troubled 18-year-old Metis youth who’d spent much of his life in government care, the hotel placement was seen as the only option in the short term.

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The occasionally violent and substance-abusing youth had done so much damage to the group home where he’d been living that he was no longer welcome.

The overseer social agency, a provincially designated authority for aboriginal children in care, struggled to recruit an experienced caregiver to serve as a kind-of foster parent.

The preferred caregiver was reluctant, knowing the youth’s history of drug dealing and drug abusing.

“I was begged — kind of like begged almost — ’cause they had nobody to fill that position,” he would tell investigators from the representative for children and youth.