Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, January 15, 1993 TAG: 9301150078
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: RICK HAMPSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
AFTER SAD, HARD YEARS, BETRAYAL, WHAT DOES A 10-YEAR-OLD GIRL DO?
Katie Beers lost her childhood a year at a time, in a tragedy more likely set in Dickensian London than suburban Long Island.At 4, she was on the street by herself, a skinny waif dragging hefty baskets of her family's dirty clothes to the cleaners.
At 6, she was cutting first grade and wandering about at all hours, often unwashed, skimpily dressed and smelling of cats.
At 8, she was a social outcast, jeered by other children as "the Cockroach Kid."
And at 9, she was abducted by a family friend and left to spend her 10th birthday in a locked subterranean cell.
That was where police found Katie Beers on Wednesday, ending the saga of the missing ragamuffin.
Katie was born in 1982, the daughter of Marilyn Beers, a cab driver and private nurse who had herself grown up in a troubled, disheveled home in the Long Island community of West Islip.
Beers never married, and has said she's not sure who Katie's father was. She brought her baby from the hospital to the house where she had grown up. Neighbors say it contained decades of rubbish.
When Katie was 2 months old, Beers abruptly left her with her godmother, Linda Inghilleri, who reared the child with assistance from her own mother, Beers, Beers' mother and various relatives.
Through the years, Katie shuttled between the Beers house and a series of apartments occupied by Inghilleri and her boyfriend and eventual husband, Sal.
Katie got an allowance of $3 a week, but by many accounts she endured a form of indentured servitude.
"She used to come in with her little wagon and soaps, washing all the clothes for all the people in her house," Trudy Welsh, an employee of the laundry near the Beers house, recalled Thursday. "She said she didn't have many friends.
"She was very thin, rings under her eyes. She looked tired all the time. She used to drink the complimentary coffee here, and I'd ask her why. She said she'd been drinking coffee a long time."
When a neighbor, Dawn Moody, called the Beers house to inquire about Katie, she said she was told to mind her own business.
Misfortune followed misfortune: Sal Inghilleri suffered a heart attack, forcing the Inghilleris and Katie to move into Beers' house, which now became crowded as well as filthy. Beers had to sell the house after she was threatened with foreclosure on a second mortgage.
In 1990, police visited Katie's home on a routine matter and reported the squalid conditions, including pet feces and roaches, to county child welfare authorities. Caseworkers twice visited the house and began compiling a dossier.
Although welfare officials have declined to discuss the case, citing strict state confidentiality laws, experts in the field say the caseworkers' inaction is understandable.
"These are difficult judgment calls," said Gerard McCaffrey of Children's House of Nassau County, a private child-care agency. "Sometimes the kid is sitting there with bruises, but it's usually not that clear-cut."
While child-welfare workers could have summarily removed Katie from her home, they would have had to justify such action in court. There, two factors would have worked against them: the preference, especially in New York State, in favor of keeping families together; and the fact that several relatives, including her mother, were eager to claim responsibility for Katie.
About a year ago, Beers and her boyfriend drove to Inghilleri's apartment and collected Katie and her belongings while Inghilleri, who because of illness needed a wheelchair, stayed in her room. Beers enrolled Katie in another school, but she was sent home with head lice.
Beers also accused Sal Inghilleri of having sexually abused Katie when they lived in West Islip. He subsequently was arrested and ordered to stay away from the child. He has denied the charge, and is scheduled to stand trial.
There had been at least one relatively bright light in Katie's sordid life - "Uncle John" Esposito, a building contractor who had befriended her brother, John, and who sometimes took Katie to toy stores or game arcades.
It was in the underground bunker he built that police found Katie, languishing in a room no worse, in some ways, than the rest of the world in which she had grown up so quickly and so sadly.