Couple left Canada for Jamaica to keep baby

 

Patricia Smith-Bell, left, and her sister, Namishay Clarke. Both live on the same street as Stephanie and Alphonso Warren did. both say that the couple moved to Jamaica to avoid having Joshua taken away by child services in Canada. (Supplied photo)

TORONTO - A former Toronto couple now sitting in a Jamaican prison after the body of their toddler was found stuffed in a suitcase only left Canada to avoid having the child taken away like their other kids were, says the boy’s godmother.
Patricia Smith-Bell, who was named the tyke’s godmother after Alphonso and Stephanie Warren brought their son, Joshua, into the world after moving to Jamaica in 2009, told the Toronto Sun that Alphonso was open about the couple’s four other kids being taken from them by child services while they were living in Toronto. Alphonso swore he would never return to Canada for that reason.
“He moved to Jamaica so the government wouldn’t take any more of his kids,” said Smith-Bell. She added that Alphonso, a Jamaican national, refused to give anyone on the Caribbean island a reason as to why the kids were taken.
The Warrens were arrested in 2008 and convicted of child abandonment after Alphonso left their 8-month-old daughter in the freezing stairwell of a north-Toronto building in January of that year. During the couple’s arrest, their three other kids - aged 4, 3 and 2 - were taken by child services.
Sources have told the Sun that Stephanie had also lost two other kids from a previous relationship either before or around the time she and Alphonso were arrested.
“(Alphonso) just came back home ... so nobody would take away Joshua,” said Namesha Clarke, who, along with Smith-Bell, led a community raid on the Warren’s home on January 15 after the boy went missing.
Joshua’s decomposing body was found crammed in a suitcase.
Det. Keith Moxley of Toronto police led the investigation into the 2008 abandonment of the 8-month-old. Moxley said early last week that the couple’s three other kids that were seized in the course of the investigation had “scaring on their skin” and had suffered abuse akin to “corporal punishment,”
Stephanie Warren told a media outlet from her jail cell on Thursday that, when it came to raising their children, neither she nor her husband did anything wrong, calling child protection services in Canada “corrupt.”
“If something happens with one child, they take all your children away,” she said, admitting that while she and Alphonso had hit their kids with a belt, they were devoutly religious and “follow the Holy Bible, the King James Bible, (and) no other book.”