MEET SAMANTHA;

HER ONLY FAMILY IS THE STATE

Palm Beach Post (Florida) June 12, 1994

Copyright 1994 Palm Beach Newspaper, Inc.

CANDY HATCHER

If there were a scrapbook of Samantha’s life, it would be filled with pictures of a freckle-faced child with a haunting smile.

Samantha with her box of filthy toys and the beat-up bicycle she rode to elementary school. Samantha with the mother who gave up her daughter but not alcohol or cocaine. Samantha with the father and brothers who began abusing her when she was just learning to talk.

If there were a scrapbook of her life, it would show the state of Florida getting involved when she was 3 and becoming her parent when she was 8. It would show the grievous way the state has raised Samantha, one of its 10,000 foster children.

Samantha with this family; Samantha with that one. Never the same one twice for Christmas. More than 20 pictures over the years of the families chosen by the state to nurture and protect this damaged child.

There’s the ward for severely mentally ill children where she was kept illegally for 20 months, despite having been diagnosed as emotionally handicapped, not mentally ill. There’s the room where she ate and studied and watched television during eighth and ninth grades. There’s the bed where she claims to have been shackled and drugged when she misbehaved.

There’s the array of drugs that slurred her speech and made her lethargic and the powerful tranquilizer prescribed for another child but sent along with Samantha when she went to still another foster home.

A scrapbook would reveal some of the horrors Samantha has endured in her 16 years. It would show how the state treated her like a ragamuffin until she became one. It would detail the ways she hurt those who cared about her.

It would begin to explain why, in March, she ran away. It would not explain why the state could not, or did not, help her. Nor why there are so many more like her.

Samantha  is  cute  and  outgoing,  120  pounds  of  determination  cloaked  in  a  devil-may-care  demeanor.  Her belongings are whatever she can carry in plastic garbage bags when she’s transferred from house to hospital to group home to Juvenile Detention Center.

She has become an expert at survival – and manipulation. She’s been forced to take anti-psychotic drugs, had pills pumped from her stomach, complained of repeated sexual abuse and run away so many times that even she has lost count.

She has learned to suppress whatever feelings she has, because sooner or later, those she cares about will leave or be taken from her.

Her backers say she’s a good kid who has been so beaten by the system that she has no incentive to be good anymore.

Samantha says all she wants is a home and a family.

”I was watching the news, and President Clinton said every child has a right to be in a home, and I’m wondering, ‘Am I different from them?’ ”

Police know the 16-year-old runaway as a victim and a victimizer. They say she’s called ”Sexy Slim” and ”Peaches” on the street. They say she’s dabbled in street drugs and talked about being a prostitute.

Most foster parents like her but remember her uncontrollable temper. Social services workers whisper that she’s a pathological liar.

In the past year, Samantha has reported being raped, feared she was pregnant and has been accused of waving a knife in a foster mother’s face – her second act of violence against a foster parent.

The state and its agencies have said alternately that Samantha is – and is not – mentally ill. One report said she suffered from severe depression; another said she did not appear to be depressed. Her counselors have said Samantha has a ”rescue fantasy” – that someone will come along, a former teacher or a former foster mother or some knight on a white horse, and take her from all these problems.

Her supporters say such a fantasy is understandable, that anyone would wish for relief from the life she has lived.

In January, Samantha was taken to the Juvenile Detention Center, then to a hospital, then to a home for troubled teens in Hallandale while her attorneys, prosecutors, guardians and various representatives of HRS tried to figure out what to do with her.

While they were arguing over what was best for her, Samantha ran away – and stayed away 10 weeks.

Police found her last week. She’s sitting in the detention center. After 13 years and hundreds of thousands of dollars, the state still doesn’t know what to do with her.

Samantha’s case is frustrating and maddening and complicated but not unusual, foster care experts say. Children come to foster care abused or neglected.   They’re sick. They have problems learning. They don’t trust anyone. They misbehave.

They’re sent to a foster home where there may be as many as four other abused or neglected children. Medicaid pays for them to see a doctor. Foster parents, who get about $ 400 a month per child, feed and clothe them.

Foster care is meant to be temporary – no longer than 18 months. It’s meant to give broken families the time and support necessary to fix their problems and reunite. It’s meant to catch the children whose families have dropped them, but it’s a ”scandalously porous safety net,” said Jim Towey, chief of Florida’s Health and Rehabilitative Services Department.

”What we do is more in the nature of disaster relief, with no promise of lasting benefit,” Towey said.

Last year, Florida ranked 48th of 50 states in programs for children, Towey said. ”Do we have kids still moving from disruptive placement to disruptive placement? You bet that’s still going on. Are they lost? Well, HRS has got ’em in a home somewhere. HRS is giving what we’ve got. Florida has earned its ranking . . . You get what you pay for in HRS, which isn’t much.”

More than half the 378 children in Palm Beach County foster homes have been in them longer than the law allows, HRS officials say. At least two-thirds of Florida’s foster children have been with HRS longer than 18 months, said Karen Gievers, a Miami lawyer who sued the state over the poor treatment of foster kids.

”Every day a child spends with HRS is a day we can’t give back to that youngster. There’s no continuity of memories,” Gievers said.

”HRS has the responsibility for teaching them values and giving them a life, and HRS is failing miserably.”

Gievers, who is running for state Insurance Commissioner, chewed out Gov.  Lawton Chiles and HRS officials this year over the way Samantha had been treated. The case of Samantha, ”a child raised by HRS for the majority of her life and kept institutionalized – at great expense to the taxpayer and with no documentation of improvement in the child – stands as a symbol of HRS’ inability to be a good parent,” she wrote Towey.

She is hopeful the state’s parenting skills are improving. So is Towey who, in visits across the state, stresses the importance of diagnosing children’s problems as soon as they’re brought into the system and providing therapy, tutoring, whatever treatment they need immediately, before the problems become worse – and more expensive.

Chiles, who emphasized early intervention in campaign speeches four years ago, said he was sickened when he heard about Samantha’s case. ”To think this could happen to someone who’s a child of the state. The state totally failed her. There’s no doubt about it. How do we keep more from being like that?”

Communities have to take responsibility for their children, he said. Schools and local government and nonprofit groups and social services agencies must work together to make sure children are loved and nurtured. Not neglected or abused.

For 10 weeks, Samantha sampled freedom. HRS didn’t know where she was, and no one was making decisions for her. For the first time in her life, there was no one to blame but herself if she messed up.

”I’m not afraid,” she said one night two months after she’d run away. ”I’m scared of going back to the detention center. I’m not scared of being out there. I been out there most of my life, and I’m used to it.”

Her light brown hair was pulled into a ponytail; her nails, once bitten to the quick, were long and pink and acrylic. No drugs, anti-psychotic or otherwise, appeared to cloud her eyes or bloat her body or slur her speech.

She had moved about South Florida like a savvy commuter, traveling the highways and side streets with relative ease. She said she worked in a restaurant. She said she lived with friends. She said she was happier than she had been in years, maybe ever.

Last week Samantha flaunted her freedom and lost it. A Lake Park police officer saw her, ran a routine check, discovered she was wanted and took her to the detention center to await trial on charges she waved a knife at a foster mother.

Now her feet are chained together whenever she’s taken outside the center.  She wears the navy blue uniform of a juvenile delinquent. She is sullen, defiant, tearful – a different person from the confident teenager who two weeks earlier had articulated her goals.

She said then that she wanted to live with a former teacher and his family.  Eventually, she said she’d like to find her mother and two brothers. She’d like to go to college and study marine biology or veterinary medicine. She said she had bought a GED study book and was working on her vocabulary, spelling and math skills, and learning how to figure percentages.

”I’m trying to do something with my life, even though I’m a runaway,” she said. ”I’m not going to give up and let HRS say, ‘Well, all she is is a runaway.’ ”

”Life is in a family,” she said. ”It’s working, and going to school, having fun. It’s not just being a runaway. I know I don’t need to be on the streets. What I need to be doing is getting my education. I’m too young to be on the streets and living with people who aren’t parents.

”There is hope out there for me.”

She says she doesn’t need tranquilizers. They depress her and make her sleepy. She doesn’t do drugs – ”One hit of crack and the rest of your life is down the drain” – and she has no interest in being a prostitute – ”I don’t need to make a living by selling my body.”

HRS workers ”don’t know me,” Samantha says. ”They just know what they read in the files. Most of the people write lies. If they sat down and talked to me like I’m a regular human being, they would understand. I’m not what everybody says I am. I have dreams; I have hopes. I would like to have a future with parents.”

Samantha says she wants people to know how she’s been treated. ”There’s millions of other kids out there. I pray to God none of ’em have to go through the things I’ve been through with HRS.”

Smoke was pouring out a bedroom window of a house in suburban Lantana.  Clothes and a mattress had been set on fire. Someone had smashed all the glasses and windows, thrown food and gallons of paint on the carpet and walls, shot a BB gun at the television and strewn contents of dresser drawers throughout the bedroom.

A message written in lipstick on the living room wall read, ”Please forgive.” Another said, ”We love you. We’re really sorry.”

It was July 15, 1991. Samantha, 13, and a 12-year-old foster child had done $ 30,000 damage to a house worth $ 50,000 and then fled. Samantha was charged with two felonies: first-degree arson and criminal mischief.

The house belonged to Sandra Hyatt, the latest in a long line of foster mothers. She was furious. She had trusted Samantha.

Samantha told Hyatt that she didn’t start the fire, she tried to put it out, and when she couldn’t, she ran. She was taken to the Juvenile Detention Center. Eight days later, Samantha pleaded guilty. She was declared delinquent, a legal distinction that basically meant Samantha, at 13, had been branded a bad kid – and that HRS had one more mechanism to control her until she turned 18.

Two months later, social services workers argued that she needed to be some place more restrictive than a foster home. They suggested a new facility for teenagers, the Adolescent Residential Learning Center operated by the 45th Street Mental Health Center. It was supposed to replace the recently closed adolescent wing of South Florida State Hospital, where some of Palm Beach County’s severely mentally ill teenagers had lived.

The center could accept foster kids – ”dependent” children, the state calls them – but was not licensed as a home for delinquent children.

Still, no one objected to the recommendation. Judge Harold Cohen signed an order, and off went Samantha, who had emotional problems but no diagnosis of mental illness.

The center, a cluster of bedrooms and a great room with three windows and two doors, is home to 15 teenagers. They go to class and to therapy, eat their meals and watch television, do their chores and see visitors. Good behavior gets them privileges such as a trip to the mall; bad behavior gets them restricted from activities, kept alone in their room, or grabbed and held until they’re under control.

They are kids ”with long histories of mental illness,” Terry Allen, director of the 45th Street Mental Health Center, said last year. ”They are mentally ill, not juvenile delinquents.”

Samantha was one of the first sent to the center, and she stayed longer than anyone. She said she hated it. She said she was mistreated. Among her accusations:

Her therapist threatened to take away her privileges if she refused to demonstrate with Barbie dolls how her father had molested her.

Staff members refused to give her mail.

Other kids hit her and kicked her and called her an orphan.

She was given lithium, Melloril, Prozac and Thorazine every day, which put her to sleep, and then was punished for sleeping in class.

She was put in restraints or injected with a tranquilizer when she misbehaved.

She tried to call HRS’ abuse hot line several times, but staff members pulled her away from the phone.

HRS officials said they could not comment on Samantha’s accusations, citing confidentiality laws. But generally, they said, the adolescent center staff may intercept ”inappropriate” mail only if they document the restriction in the child’s file. They said a licensed psychiatrist prescribes and monitors each child’s medication. They said the center does not shackle children, nor does it control behavior through the use of medication.

Only in rare cases does it use drugs to calm a child, and then the drug is given orally, not by injection. And they said the center never prevents children from calling the abuse hot line.

In February 1992, when Samantha had been in the ward only four months, she wrote a letter expressing frustration:

I ran away because of all the things that were going on, on the unit. Things were so bad that the kids were throwing chairs through windows and they . . .  had to bolt the chairs together and put boards on the windows. I came back because I knew I was either get hurt or be found dead somewhere. The only thing that I get depressed about is that other kids have thier parents coming to vist them.

The letter was to Sandra Hyatt, the former foster mother whose house Samantha had helped destroy seven months earlier. Hyatt now believed Samantha was merely aping her foster sister during the rampage.

”Samantha is not at all a violent kid. She’s definitely a follower,” Hyatt said recently.

Hyatt, who had moved to South Carolina, visited Samantha. She remembered how happy the child was to have a visitor. ”See everybody, I do have a Mom,” she recalled Samantha saying to her friends.

Hyatt and her husband, Mike, told Samantha and center officials they’d like to adopt her. The couple, who drive trucks, began sending postcards and packages from different states.

Samantha wrote back, sometimes two or three times a week. She said she couldn’t wait to be part of a family. Once, she signed her name Samantha Hyatt. Several times she drew stick-figure families of a mother, father and child.

Social services workers began to worry that Samantha was spending all her time thinking about being adopted instead of trying to work through her problems.

”When you write to Samantha, please do not discuss your intentions to seek to adopt her,” a counselor wrote the Hyatts in May 1992. ”Samantha does need your support; however, she needs to keep focused on her treatment and less on futuristic plans.”

By September, Samantha’s counselors had become convinced that the Hyatts’ unpredictable travel schedule and their inability to make appointments a day or more in advance did Samantha more bad than good.

Eventually the Hyatts were told that they couldn’t adopt Samantha and that they would not be allowed to contact her. Their involvement, they were told, had been sporadic and counterproductive, and Samantha had blamed herself when she didn’t hear from them.

Hyatt said she and her husband were bitterly disappointed but decided the adoption wasn’t meant to be.

Samantha had no family. No support. She was the only child on the ward with nowhere to go for Christmas.

Her teacher, Shannon Harmon, invited her to his family’s home for the holidays. They bought presents and delayed some of their holiday plans so she could be part of them. His wife took a week off work to spend time with the child.

The day before Samantha planned to go home with Harmon, his supervisor told him he couldn’t take her. ”We’re afraid you’re becoming too close, and you can’t be her rescuer,” he said he was told.

In February 1993, Harmon said he was asked to leave his job. Officials there said Harmon had interfered with Samantha’s treatment.

Two months later, he called Mark Wilensky, a personal-injury lawyer and feisty former public defender. Harmon said he wanted to adopt Samantha, that he’d been trained to help children like her, but that HRS wouldn’t allow it. He asked Wilensky to help.

Over the next few weeks, Wilensky filed a flurry of motions to show that Samantha didn’t belong in the adolescent ward. He and Ed O’Hara, an attorney and her recently appointed legal advocate, tried to get an independent psychiatrist to examine her; they also argued that she should be released from the center because she was there without the protections of Florida’s mental health law.

Judge Matthew Stevenson told HRS to bring Samantha to a hearing in June 1993.

First HRS said Samantha was in the center voluntarily.

Samantha said no, she wasn’t.

Then HRS said Samantha was a dependent child, and HRS controlled where she was placed.

Stevenson said no, not if it’s a mental ward. Not if she hasn’t been committed under the Baker Act. He ordered Samantha released immediately.

Samantha remembers the beatings. She was just a toddler. Her father drank, she said, and then he hit her. Molested her. Told her brothers to do the same.

Her parents separated, and she went to live with her grandparents in Tennessee. From the time she was 3 until she was 8, she was sent from Jacksonville to Tennessee to Jacksonville to Maryland to Virginia and back to Jacksonville. She lived with her mother sometimes, or relatives, and her father visited. HRS threatened to take her away if the abuse happened again.

When Samantha was 8, a judge took her away for good, and she became a child of the state.

She began running. That’s how she learned to get away from a bad situation.  When the foster parents were mean. When someone in the house abused her. When no one believed her.

She was sent to a new home about every six months.

Samantha was 9 the last time she saw her mother. ”She told me she was sorry. She didn’t mean to hurt me.”

One of these days, Samantha said recently, she hopes to find her mother again. ”I’d like to talk to her, see her, let her see how grown up I am now.”

The state put Samantha up for adoption, and a West Palm Beach couple became interested. The man’s daughter was grown; he’d worked with children in the Big Brother program; he believed he and his wife could help.

It was early 1989. Samantha was 10 and living with an elderly black woman, a nice lady, as she recalls.

The couple drove to Jacksonville and introduced themselves. ”Here’s a child that’s in real need of a family and somebody to love her,” the man remembered thinking. The couple liked her, found her outgoing, a good swimmer and a good athlete.

The couple knew very little about Samantha’s past. They didn’t know she’d been molested, and HRS officials in Jacksonville refused to tell them.  ”Information prior to date of placement is unavailable to petitioners but is within the knowledge of the Department of Health and Rehabilitative Services,” the adoption petition said.

The man, who asked that he not be identified, recalled ignoring the warning signs. ”We were so excited about getting her, we looked over any real problems,” he said. But ”we should have known what we were getting into.”

HRS officials say they rarely know a child’s complete history, but they try to share all they know with adoptive parents.

Samantha’s problems began almost immediately – months before the adoption was final in December 1989. Samantha, 11, was sent home from a two-week summer camp for misbehaving. When school started, the sixth- grader began skipping class. She threatened a teacher and was suspended, her adoptive father said.

Samantha showed extraordinary interest in sex, the man said.

The family attended counseling sessions with Samantha, but by April 1990, she was in a psychiatric center in Fort Lauderdale, where treatment costs between $ 900 and $ 1,200 a day, the man said. His insurance covered her treatment for two or three months. When the insurance ran out, she was sent to a hospital in Lake Worth. The couple asked HRS for help. HRS, the man said, apologized for not having sent monthly supplements. But still the couple received no money.

The couple tried once more. They sent Samantha to a center in Vero Beach for disturbed children, and they attended counseling sessions with her and a psychiatrist.

By August, 15 months after Samantha had come to live with the couple, everyone agreed the family relationship could never work and that Samantha should be returned to HRS. ”I’d just had it,” the man said.

The couple gave her back to HRS in September. In December, the first check from HRS arrived – $ 214. Similar checks were sent to the couple for the next 14 months. The couple never cashed them.

The adoptive father is angry and frustrated and sad. ”I did everything I could,” he said. ”She’s smart as a whip. She could be a good kid, but I don’t know how to guide her.

”You can’t blame her for the way she is,” he said. ”You take an old dog and kick him around enough, he’ll bite you before long.”

When children are abused sexually, they generally begin having sex early in adolescence, and many become promiscuous, experts say. Children learn that sex is the way to get intimacy and closeness and attention.

When sexual abuse happens before children are 5 or 6, the problems are even more complicated. Their ability to develop trusting relationships is badly damaged.

Their attachments are very intense but very short-lived. There’s a tremendous desire for closeness, but ”those feelings are complicated by rejections and pain,” said Dr. Michael Hughes, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Miami. So they run away or get themselves kicked out or hurt.

When the family abuses the child, it falls upon society to pick up the pieces. And when the state moves children from foster home to foster home, society misses the opportunity to treat them and help them become well, Hughes said.

They may use drugs or set fires. They are four times more likely to be arrested than children who haven’t been abused.

The result? ”They’re enormously harmful to society. They cost society a fortune in prisons, welfare lines, the cost of crime, rapes, accidents. And they’re destructive to themselves.”

Bruce Ambuel, a leading authority on child abuse and professor at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Waukesha, said it helps ”to have someone believe you’re a worthwhile person.”

It’s easy for foster parents or guardians to get mad and say children aren’t trying, he said. But ”it’s important to always remember how profoundly different their upbringing was and how many barriers they have. If they make a 1 percent step in the right direction, it may not be noticeable to you or me, but that amount of improvement may require tremendous effort on their part.”

Ruth Sefarbi, a psychologist who works with sex offenders at the Philadelphia Child Guidance Center, said children such as Samantha need a specialized foster home with parents who have experience and training, as well as a trained therapist to work with the entire family.

Samantha can be helped, Sefarbi said. ”If I didn’t believe that, I wouldn’t be in this business. I’ve seen miraculous things happen.”

In July 1993, six weeks after Judge Stevenson ordered Samantha released from the adolescent center, she was awaiting new foster parents, working part time at a nursery, attending summer school and having fun.

She’d set some goals: She wanted parents. She wanted to go to a real high school. She wanted to find out what happened to her mother and two brothers, and she wanted a chance to say goodbye to a friend at the adolescent center.

Shortly after the fall semester began, Samantha went to live in Lake Worth with a couple recently licensed as therapeutic foster parents. She attended special education classes at a public high school.

Samantha was their first foster child. The couple liked her, the mother said, but weren’t told the severity of her problems. They weren’t told that Samantha claimed to have been sexually abused in nearly every foster home she’d been in. They didn’t realize she would be so sedated that she would sleep every time she sat down in a chair.

The parents were given three containers of two drugs to give Samantha: tablets and a bottle of liquid thioridazine, a powerful tranquilizer used for major mental illnesses; and Depakote, pills used mostly to treat seizures but sometimes to control aggressive behavior.

The label on the liquid was ripped, so the foster mother said she called Samantha’s counselor to get another bottle with Samantha’s name on it. The counselor sent over two unopened bottles of the drug. Both were prescribed for another child.

The foster mother, who asked that her name not be used, said she called the pharmacist and was told the pharmacy had no record of ever having filled such a prescription for Samantha. The drug, her foster mother said, ”sends her into a zombie state.”

HRS chief Towey said that if someone with HRS gave another child’s drugs to Samantha, ”that’s terrible. If there’s a worker out there responsible for it, I want accounting for it.”

The foster mother said she stopped giving most of the medicine and said that within a few days Samantha ”woke up.”

Samantha stayed with the couple for 2 1/2 months. She left the day she told school officials that she’d been raped the previous afternoon on her way home from school. Samantha says one boy raped her while another held her down; she says she identified her attackers in a lineup.

However, police never arrested anyone. The foster mother says Samantha was home at the time she reported being raped and that it was simply a plea for attention.

”She has an ungraspable amount of anger in her that she keeps very well hidden,” the foster mother said. ”She has learned how to manipulate.”

The rape accusation made the foster mother realize she and her husband had no protection against any accusation of abuse. She said they couldn’t risk keeping the girl. They delivered Samantha to a crisis house for foster children.

Samantha lived there for less than two months. The foster mother called police after Samantha approached her and another foster child with a knife.

Samantha, charged with two counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon, was sent to the Juvenile Detention Center.

Mental health center officials evaluated Samantha in January and determined that she had a ”conduct disorder.” But they said her thoughts and perceptions were well organized, no delusions or hallucinations were evident, and she did not appear depressed.

They said their conclusions were consistent with previous evaluations. They said Samantha had ”highly sophisticated manipulative strategies” and a ”lack of remorse.”

The next month, Samantha was sent to a hospital for psychological evaluations. She was found to have ”a major and severe depression, intermittent explosive disorder, and conduct disorder.” She was sent back to the detention center.

In late February, Samantha asked Judge Hubert Lindsey to release her from the detention center and to let her live with her former teacher at the adolescent center, Shannon Harmon. The judge said Harmon wasn’t a relative, and he couldn’t do that. Instead, he sent her to Hallandale, to a home for troubled teenagers and made her promise she wouldn’t run away.

Three weeks later, Samantha came to court to tell Lindsey how things were going. She had run away but had come back on her own. She said she’d been asked to be vice president of her school’s cheerleading squad. She said she’d get her uniform the next week. She smiled.

Lindsey, familiar with bits and pieces of Samantha’s past, was touched.  Lindsey wanted to believe that Samantha would settle into this latest home and be happy, finally.

Three days later, Samantha ran away.

Harmon distributed fliers with Samantha’s picture, asking that anyone with information on her whereabouts call him.

HRS asked for a pickup order, which allowed police to take Samantha into custody if they saw her.

Her guardian ad litem called the Adam Walsh Center for Missing Children.

The Sheriff’s Office assigned a missing-persons investigator to her case.

HRS and the police accused Harmon of harboring Samantha.

Ed O’Hara and Mark Wilensky, the lawyers who have spent hundreds of hours on Samantha’s case, fumed about HRS’ accusations.

”Sometimes,” O’Hara said, ”I feel as though I’m supposed to pull a miracle and get this child out of HRS custody.”

Wilensky would like to try. ”That this child is in her present situation is an indictment of a system which has failed,” he said. ”That the department continues to suggest that its actions in this matter are defensible and that it is working to protect the children of this state is the proof of that indictment.

”They raised her. They raised her to be a kid who’s in trouble with the law. And at 18 they’re going to walk away from her and say their job is done. . . .  HRS has ruined her life from the beginning, ensured she was an orphan, forced her into having no support system.

”They have an obligation to prepare the child for the real world. In Samantha’s case, they didn’t do that.”

HOW THIS STORY WAS DONE

This report was based on eight court hearings and more than 30 interviews with Samantha, her attorneys, former foster and adoptive parents, a former teacher, judges, psychologists, psychiatrists, law enforcement officers, foster care attorneys and officials and experts on foster children and runaways. Also reviewed for this story were police reports and some court records, as well as letters from the child and correspondence from attorneys and HRS officials. HRS officials, citing confidentiality laws, could not comment specifically on Samantha’s case, but they discussed how the state generally handles troublesome cases.

Samantha, referred to as S.B. in previous stories, allowed her first name to be used.

Staff librarians Michelle Quigley, Sammy Alzofon and Fred Schmidt contributed to this report.