Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 21, 1992 TAG: 9202210379
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
FATHER SENTENCED FOR CHILD NEGLECT
Lynette Jobe, a Roanoke child abuse investigator, answered her telephone last Feb. 27 to hear a screaming and cursing man who said he no longer could care for his 3-year-old daughter.The man said he wanted Social Services to take the child away, less than two weeks after he had decided to raise her on his own.
When social workers arrived at the home on Moorman Road Northwest, Wardell Brown was waiting to show them what he was talking about, Jobe testified Thursday.
He led them to a bed where the shivering and whimpering 3-year-old lay curled in a fetal position, covered with feces, Jobe testified. Both of her legs were broken, there were second-degree burns on her genitals, and her body was covered with cuts and bruises.
Brown, 26, was sentenced Thursday to eight years in prison for felony child neglect.
Assistant Commonwealth's Attorney Wanda DeWease said Brown's frustrations with parenthood apparently began with his unsuccessful efforts to toilet-train his daughter, but soon progressed "from willful neglect to actual abuse."
"She has the right to look to her father for love and protection," DeWease said. "But in this case, her father turned out to be her worst nightmare."
Brown had pleaded no contest to the charge last year, contending that while he may have made mistakes raising his daughter, he never intentionally hurt her.
Assistant Public Defender Roberta Bondurant argued that the case was not about a "deadbeat daddy," but was an example of how a disadvantaged child with a disabled father - Brown is deaf - can "slip through the cracks" of the city's welfare system.
"There is a collective responsibility involved in this case," she said.
"We don't lock people up for ignorance," Bondurant said in appealing to Roanoke Circuit Judge Clifford Weckstein for a lenient sentence. "We use our resources to help them."
Speaking sometimes through an interpreter, Brown maintained Thursday that he was not aware that his daughter was covered by Medicaid, or that other Social Services options were available to him.
Bondurant argued that such a scenario is not unheard of in a part of the city where health care is not always accessible, and where Social Services options are not always understood. "The welfare system is a maze that even the educated find difficult to negotiate," she said.
Although Brown testified that he was not aware of how to get help for his daughter, he also maintained that much of her abuse was self-inflicted.
He testified that the child suffered burns to her genitals when she climbed into a bathtub and turned on the hot water. But in a victim-impact assessment, the daughter said her father poured scalding water on her, DeWease said.
As for her broken legs and bruises, Brown explained that his daughter often tripped and fell. At one point, his live-in girlfriend said, the child hit herself repeatedly in the head with a vase.
But DeWease argued that the child's injuries could not have been sustained that way.
When the child was treated at Roanoke Memorial Hospital for a broken leg, doctors there found no other injuries. But when Brown called social services workers to his home eight days later, the 3-year-old was in such bad condition that she had to be transferred to the University of Virginia Hospital.
Doctors in Charlottesville also found the child so dehydrated and malnourished that her body was the size of a normal 1-year-old's, DeWease said. The child since has started a recovery and is in foster care. Both Brown and the child's 15-year-old mother have given up their parental rights.
Testimony has shown that the child was put up for foster care shortly after she was born. Brown later gained custody, and cared for the child with the help of his mother. His problems with parenthood apparently began when he moved out of his mother's home and tried to raise his daughter along with his girlfriend's twins at the Moorman Road home.
As part of his sentence, Weckstein ordered that Brown be placed on probation for 12 years after his release, and that he receive parenting classes. Brown will be eligible for parole after he serves about 16 months, DeWease said.
In arguing that Brown truly cared for his daughter but became overwhelmed with raising her, Bondurant pointed to a written statement he gave to court officials.
In it, Brown said he sat on a curb and cried the day social services workers took his daughter away.
"I hated to let her go," Brown wrote. "But I didn't know what to do or how to care for her."