FOUR CASE STUDIES

Palm Beach Post (Florida) March 19, 1995

Copyright 1995 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.

Candy Hatcher

There were 24 Florida children named in a class-action suit against the state’s foster care system. They represent thousands of children damaged by that system.

They are identified by letters or initials or pseudonyms, but their stories – from Miami to Marion County, from West Palm Beach to Jacksonville to Tallahassee – carry the same refrain. They were abused or neglected by their parents, and when they looked to the state to make things better, the state turned its head – or made things worse. Here are the stories of 11 of the children.

SAMANTHA: ‘A TOUGH KID’ STILL SEARCHING FOR A FAMILY OF HER OWN

Samantha has spent most of her 17 years as a foster child. She lives in a cottage on a Dade County campus for troubled youths. She is a survivor – cute, savvy and manipulative. After a decade of shuffling through foster homes and hospitals and detention centers, looking for love, Samantha is no closer to her dream: a family of her own.

She is identified as Child I in Karen Gievers’ class-action lawsuit against the state, although she agreed to allow The Palm Beach Post to use her first name in a story last year on her plight.

Samantha’s father, an alcoholic, beat her when she was just a toddler and told her brothers to hit her too. Her mother drank and used cocaine. Samantha spent her first eight years being shuttled among relatives and foster parents in Florida, Tennessee, Maryland and Virginia before the state of Florida took permanent custody.

She lived in a series of foster homes, a different one about every six months, before being adopted by a West Palm Beach couple when she was 11. Life was rosy for a few months, and then Samantha began misbehaving. She was sent to psychiatric hospitals, and the family went to counseling. After a year, the couple said they could no longer help – or afford – Samantha. They gave her back to the state.

HRS placed her in another foster home. The following year, Samantha and another child were charged with setting the house on fire. She was sent to the Juvenile Detention Center, declared delinquent and placed, with a judge’s permission, in a facility for mentally ill teenagers, where she was given powerful tranquilizers. She had been diagnosed as emotionally handicapped, not mentally ill.

While there, Samantha became close to the foster family whose house she had helped to destroy, but HRS refused to allow the couple to adopt her and severed the relationship. The same thing happened when a teacher asked Samantha to spend Christmas with his family.

Two attorneys who heard about Samantha’s plight petitioned a judge to remove Samantha from the facility where she had lived for 20 months, saying she was there illegally. The judge agreed. Over the next six months, Samantha attended four high schools and lived in as many foster homes. Parents found her lovable but manipulative and at times uncontrollable. During the Christmas holidays, Samantha was charged with threatening a foster mother with a knife.

She was sent back to the detention center, then to a Broward County group home, and then she ran away. Police found her 11 weeks later. HRS moved her to the Dade County cottage, where she has lived since last summer.

Samantha  has  trouble  with  grammar  and  math,  but  her  social  skills  are  improving  and  administrators  are considering sending her to public school for a few classes, said her attorney, Ed O’Hara. She spent Christmas Eve with O’Hara and his family, and Christmas Day with her guardian ad litem, who visits regularly.

”She has to figure out what she wants to do,” O’Hara said. ”She talks about marine biology, veterinary medicine, and she could attain those dreams. . . . She has potential. She’s a pretty darned tough kid to have endured what she’s endured.”

MELODY: ‘THEY SAY IT’S HER FAULT’

Melody, a child of the state for 13 of her 18 years, lives in an institution near Tampa. She’s been moved 22 times in the past 13 years to foster homes, hospitals, institutions and group homes. She’s had 23 HRS caseworkers since she was 2.

Although her IQ was first measured in the 70s, meaning she was mildly retarded but capable of reading and writing, Melody has regressed and now functions at the level of a 4-year-old, said Karen Gievers, her attorney. She recently wrote her friend in the Big Sister program. ”I love you very muched, and I been a good girl,” she said.

Melody, the name given the teenager for purposes of the lawsuit, was taken from her mother permanently when she was 5 because HRS determined the woman was neglecting Melody and her two sisters and brother. At one point, the family was living in a completely dark storeroom with no windows, no running water, no bathroom or beds. The place smelled of urine.

When Melody was 6, she lived in eight foster homes in six months. When she was 7, she was sent to a residential treatment program in Hollywood for speech therapy and counseling. She was given Mellaril and Lithium. Although she had been described as ”mildly retarded,” her IQ was determined to be 59 or less. A social worker wrote that Melody was diabetic, although none of her medical examinations ever noted such a diagnosis.

Melody came to school several times with bruises on her arms and legs, and she said her foster mother had beaten her with a belt. She was separated from her sister when she was 8 and sent to other institutions, where she was given excessive medication and, for nine days in a two-week period, kept in restraints and in isolation, said Gievers. She was not allowed to see her sister when she visited. Her condition deteriorated. ”You have nobody to give you hope,” Gievers said. ”You don’t know whom to trust.”

Melody was diagnosed as psychotic before she was 9. When she was in fifth grade, she attacked a bus aide. The police came, and the child was handcuffed. Two years later, she was suspended for four days for hitting a teacher. Counselors said she acted out sexually.

Throughout her teens, Melody was given as many as six drugs at a time. Counselors found that her behavior improved when her medication was adjusted. She made friends. She was able to attend school, and her aggressiveness lessened. ”Now that she is under better control,” one report said, ”HRS has decided to remove her from care.”

”They give (her) medication that makes (her) get aggressive and can cause a perception warp, and then they say it’s her fault, and they give her medication to calm her down,” Gievers said.

”Charles Dickens could not have imagined this stuff.”

CHILDREN A-F: A LAWSUIT IS ‘THE CLOSEST THING TO A FAMILY SCRAPBOOK THESE KIDS HAVE.’

Fifteen years ago, the state took three children into foster care because their mother had neglected them. Those three children, known as A, B and C, are still in foster care. One, a 15-year-old, has given birth to a son, who also is in foster care.

Ten years ago, the state took the three younger siblings of A, B and C into custody because the mother was neglecting them. Two of the three, children E and F, have been adopted; D is still a ward of the state.

A few weeks ago, HRS took into custody the two most recent additions to the family: a girl, 3, and a boy, 18 months. Same mother as the previous six; same problem.

What has become of this family, known as A-F, has come to represent all that is wrong with Florida’s foster care system. The poor treatment the children received in foster homes and hospitals – and the length of time they’ve been wards of the state – prompted Miami lawyer Karen Gievers to sue Florida in 1990.

Gievers says the lawsuit, Children vs. Chiles, is ”the closest thing to a family scrapbook these kids have.”

HRS took the kids in 1980 when Child A, a boy, was about 4, Child B, also a boy, was about 2 and Child C, a girl, was an infant. The girl immediately was separated from her brothers. The boys were kept together until the late 1980s.

Child A was doing well until he reached high school, then he ”was placed in some really awful foster homes,” Gievers said. School records didn’t keep up with his foster home placements. He missed more than 35 days of school.

Still, his guardian ad litem ”believed he could be salvaged,” Gievers said, and foster-care advocates began arrangements to send him to Tallahassee for a week as a Senate page. They bought him a blue blazer and dress shoes and arranged for a family to keep him, and the governor invited him to lunch, and the state Supreme Court justices spent time with him.

”It gave him a reason to be in school,” Gievers said. He graduated from high school and now is a 19-year-old freshman at Florida A&M University.

His first-semester grades were mixed: an A, a B, an F and an Incomplete. Still, he’s the first in his family to go to college, Gievers said, and ”he hopes to be the first in his family to graduate.”

His closest sibling is 17 and in a group home for troubled youths. He was sexually assaulted five years ago after HRS put him in a home with a sex abuser. He didn’t receive counseling immediately. For three years after that, he was hospitalized in a psychiatric facility – an inappropriate place for him, Gievers said. When she found a more appropriate facility for half the price, HRS balked. Gievers, already representing the teenager in the class-action suit against the state, filed a separate lawsuit against HRS in this case to get Child B moved to a more appropriate place.

Now he’s in a group home and he’s going to school. ”He’s still messed up,” Gievers said.

Their sister, in another foster home, began her romp through foster homes when her first foster mother died. The child was sent from home to home and not allowed contact with her brothers for years.

”She got into the habit of running away,” Gievers said. ”She found people who would have sex with her. She felt wanted.” She got pregnant and gave birth when she was 14. She is 15 now, the baby’s father is in jail and their child is in foster care.

”She’s not doing well in school,” Gievers said. ”She does not feel like she belongs to any family.”

Child D is 13. He was separated from his younger brother and sister the year after he became a foster child. The family didn’t want him because he wet the bed regularly. He’s still in foster care. ”He’s good in art and very athletic,” Gievers said. ”He’d make some family a wonderful son.”

Children E and F, after more than seven years in foster care, were adopted in 1992. The boy and girl, about 13 and 12, see their siblings infrequently.

T.J., HIS BROTHER AND SISTER: NO PLACE ‘TO JUST BE KIDS’

HRS heard about T.J.’s mom beating the toddler on the head. Caseworkers made note of the time she shoved T.J.’s hand and arm into a bucket of scalding water, causing severe burns. When HRS discovered the mother had twisted the child’s arm so hard that it snapped, the state took custody of 2-year-old T.J., his baby brother and older sister.

That was 1990. The children, from Miami, have been in foster care since then. They live together in an institution, but ”it’s not like having a home,” said their attorney, Karen Gievers. ”They don’t have any play areas where they can just be kids.”

She would like the children to be adopted and, she says, ”people are confident they can find adoptive parents.” But HRS only recently filed the paperwork to terminate the mother’s parental rights. The case is still in the courts and probably won’t be heard for several months, Gievers said.

”The children,” she said, ”after five years with HRS, are not available for adoption.”

HRS didn’t want to sever the family relationship. The state ”kept wanting her to get her act together,” Gievers said. The mother pleaded no contest to charges of aggravated child abuse. While she was behind bars, HRS began planning for her to attend parenting classes, despite pleas from the guardian ad litem to keep the children from their mother.

The kids – T.J. is nearly 7, his sister, 9, and his brother, 5 – aren’t doing well, Gievers said. They ”began to deteriorate when they were told their mother was out of jail.”