“If it turns out that this woman was indeed trying to profit from our situation and that a despicable fraud has been committed, I will be pursuing this to its fullest extent…”
Suffice to say, Lia Weekes’ emotions were flowing this week back and forth between utter disbelief and anger.
Considering, however, she’d confronted a woman raising money for Weekes’ seriously ill son, Joshua, allegedly under false pretences, the little boy’s mom showed incredible restraint.
Earlier this month, Richmond mom Weekes — whose six-year-old son has leukemia and urgently needs a bone marrow transplant — had heard from a relative that a fundraising table was set up outside a Coquitlam supermarket, with Joshua’s face plastered all over posters.
A woman at the table was asking for money from the public to “help with costs” and claimed to work for the Canadian Blood Services (CBS).
Weekes and Joshua’s godmother decided to go and see the table and the woman, now identified by Global BC as Kyra Kathleen Foster.
“From the very beginning it didn’t feel right,” Weekes told the Richmond News on Wednesday.
“All of the other CBS drives were diligently communicated to us and this instance was a complete surprise. We had also never had CBS offer to solicit funds for the family...
“(Foster’s) story kept changing and I began to feel more and more uncomfortable about the situation.”
At first, Weekes didn’t want to believe someone would be trying to capitalize on her son’s fight for life, but “red flags kept presenting themselves,” including Foster having her own credit card swiper at the table.
Weekes contacted CBS, but Foster had got to them first. “CBS told us that (Foster) must have had good intentions but gotten confused and she was willing to give us the funds she had raised on that one day.
“So, I accepted the funds and thanked (Foster), even though the situation still didn’t feel quite right.”
A week later, Foster, despite claiming she’d only fundraised that one time, had, in fact, been seen using Joshua’s plight to solicit funds from the public on a total of four occasions at three different grocery stores. CBS has said that it does not solicit funds on behalf of any family.
And it turns out, Foster was spotted raising money for a different child in Ladner in March and Westshore RCMP on Vancouver Island are investigating a similar setup in Langford last Christmas.
According to Global BC, Foster has a history in the court system. In 2005, she was ordered to pay a Halifax property company more than $15,000. More recently, a court ordered her to pay more than $2,000 to her ex-landlords. They never received the money.
Foster told Global, via email, that she has been campaigning for sick children and she just had another family ask her for help.
Coquitlam RCMP is now investigating Foster, however, the detachment’s media spokesperson, Const. Jamie Phillipson, said via email to the News that the “ultimate goal is to determine if a criminal offence took place or if it was a case of misguided intentions.”
Weekes said she could do without the additional stress “on top of everything we are already facing.
“Thankfully, the support and genuine care that we have been so blessed to receive from the public far outweighs the impact of this horrible experience.”
Grade 1 DeBeck elementary student Joshua has a rare form of leukemia and a unique ethnicity of Filipino, British, Icelandic and Caribbean — making it difficult to find a stem cell match.
Despite the push from the local community and beyond, a match has yet to be found.
Those interested in learning more about the donation process can visit Blood.ca online.
