Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, June 1, 1994 TAG: 9406010040
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER NOTE: below
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
The photographs, tucked in a court file, show a 3-year-old girl, charred skin covering her forehead, arms and legs. One nostril appears melted shut. Two long, narrow marks trail down the back of her shaved head.
Her mother, the child told a volunteer caseworker, burned her with hot grease, then shoved her into an oven when she cried.
The Roanoke Department of Social Services had a history of neglect complaints against the girl's parents - of the girl and her four brothers living in filth, of them being left alone.
But not until the burn incident - in October 1992 - did a judge remove the children from their home.
And not until a year and a half later - after the mother and father refused to comply with court orders to make efforts to become better parents - did a judge terminate their parental rights.
The mother appealed the termination of rights from Roanoke Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court to Roanoke Circuit Court. Although she failed to show up for a Circuit Court hearing last month, resulting in dismissal of her appeal, she can petition a higher court.
To many people, such an incident would seem to warrant an automatic end to parental rights.
But the system is one that works to right the wrongs in families, that gives parents every opportunity to become more responsible.
Then, in many cases, it sends the children back home. Or it tangles children's lives in foster care. Or, as a final resort, it forever separates children from parents.
It is a system, some say, that too often fails to protect the children.
Tommy is 20 months old. Developmentally, he is 2 to 3 months old.
He cannot see. He cannot chew. He sucks from a bottle, but only two to three minutes after it has been placed in his mouth.
It takes him that long to remember how to suck.
Tommy (not his real name) was shaken so violently at 6 weeks of age by one of his parents that his brain was severely damaged. And while he lay in Community Hospital near death in November 1992, the Roanoke Department of Social Services was working to remove Tommy from his home and place him in foster care.
When Becky, a foster parent for the city of Roanoke, first saw Tommy, he looked "horrible," she said. His eyes were sunken. He couldn't tolerate movement or handling.
Becky and her husband brought him into their home.
Tommy's father failed a polygraph test. Eventually, he confessed to shaking the baby.
Authorities offered the father a deal - give up rights to the child and he would not be prosecuted. He signed over his rights in February.
The mother, who did not take a polygraph test, did not contest termination of parental rights at a March hearing in Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court. Judge Joseph Clark formally terminated their rights to Tommy.
Tommy's mother gave birth to a second child in March. The baby, a girl, was placed in Becky's care when she was 2 days old.
The parents want their baby girl back.
"Even if there's only the slightest possibility that something might happen to her, is it worth the chance?" Becky asked.
At a court hearing several weeks ago, Clark extended the parents' visitations with the baby from one supervised hour to three unsupervised hours. Becky said she left the hearing convinced that the baby would be returned to her parents. That will be determined at a court hearing in July.
Clark declined to comment on the case, as did the children's biological parents.
Becky and her husband - who have two daughters, 12 and 14 - are adopting Tommy.
"His case is closed, wiped clean," Becky said. "These parents are walking the streets. They were not punished at all.
"Laws don't protect children until they are hurt. And until the public is made aware, our laws are not going to change."
In the social services and legal systems, no ties are as strong as blood ties. And if the ties have in some way loosened, the systems work to tighten them.
Once children are removed from their homes, parents typically are ordered by courts to attend rehabilitative services, such as parenting education classes, couples' counseling and anger management sessions. In some cases, mental health counseling and alcohol or drug treatment is ordered.
"Usually it is done for 12 months or so to work with parents to correct whatever problem there is," said Judy Brown, supervisor of Child Protective Services and Adult Protective Services, a division of the Roanoke Department of Social Services.
"At the end of 12 months they are re-evaluated and it could be continued for another 12 months. But once you go beyond that, in most cases, you start looking at the possibility of adoption, of termination of parental rights."
Termination is near the bottom rung of the remedial ladder.
"It's a drastic step for the biological parents to never again be allowed contact with their child," Clark said. "Up to a certain point, it is in the best interest of the child to remain with his or her family."
Clark - who says he handles two to three cases a week in which the issue is whether to remove a child from parents' custody - says what is perceived as judges' dragging their feet or weighing in heavily on the side of parents is more a matter of law. There are those who have criticized judges for returning children home too quickly, against Social Services' recommendation.
But the state law on termination says that a child can be removed from the care of parents only when there is sufficient evidence that the child's welfare is in danger or if it is in the interest of public safety.
The child's best interest is not the only concern. A host of other conditions must be met.
"It is not just my interpretation," Clark said. "The law in Virginia prefers that families remain together unless a child's welfare is in danger. Judges all along have done what honestly and reasonably they could to keep children safe.
"But they are human. And from time to time, bad judgment calls are going to be made."
Several times a week, 5-year-old Jenny asks her foster mother, Mary, if she can stay. Jenny (not her real name) is terrified of the possibility of going home.
Jenny will tell anyone who asks about her disfiguring burns that her biological mother poured hot grease on her and pushed her into a heated oven.
That is the only time Jenny speaks of her mother. She does not ask about her or her father, said Mary, who is adopting Jenny.
Yet Mary cannot assure Jenny that she will never return to a home where she and her brothers slept on piles of dirty clothes and where cigarette butts and cockroaches floated in a bathtub full of standing water.
"With a system like this, I can't tell her she's not going home," Mary said. "Social Services has done cases where they thought they had won and the parents appeal and it goes to a higher court and the judge orders the children home. It depends on the judge, on the system, on who hears the case and the way they see it."
Jenny and her four brothers were placed in temporary custody after a social worker filed a petition containing the following allegations:
"On 10/06/92, two of the children ... were taken to the emergency room with severe burns. ... Two other children had visible physical injuries, one had a black eye and the other had apparent abrasions and blisters on his buttocks (later found to be burns), from unknown causes. The apartment was filthy with beer cans and dirty clothes all over the floors and a pile of dirty dishes in the sink. Department of Social Services feels the children are in danger of further injury and there is no alternative less drastic than removal."
The children were placed with foster families.
Kim, a Roanoke foster parent, brought two of Jenny's brothers to her home the night they were taken from their parents. Eventually, the other two were placed in her care.
The boys had grown so accustomed to sleeping on the floor that they couldn't tolerate sleeping in a bed. They had never seen a toothbrush, she said.
They tell Kim which drugs give people the best high, she said. Two of the boys show symptoms of fetal alcohol syndrome, which can result if a mother drinks during pregnancy. The syndrome produces a variety of long-term physical and behavioral problems.
According to court records, the children's mother had a history of drug and alcohol abuse.
"I can't fathom how these kids made it as long as they did," Kim said.
The children's mother had a different account of the burn incident. She told authorities that the children pulled the stove over, according to court records. The incident is under criminal investigation.
The parents were granted visitation with their children. Visits began one month after the October 1992 incident.
During the first visit, the oldest boy vomited after entering the room. On another visit, everyone shied from Jenny, who was wearing a mask to cover her healing burns.
The mother "wanted to know why she had to wear her mask," a social worker wrote in a report filed in court records. "I told her the injuries were very serious. She said that would change when [Jenny] got home."
The boys would return to their foster home after visits and "act out" for several days, Kim said. "One smeared feces on the wall," she said. "I couldn't get another out of bed."
One boy would spray "monsters" away at night with a bottle of magic water, Kim's invention.
In February 1993, the court terminated the mother's visitations. The father's visits were ended in September.
In March, a judge terminated parental rights. The parents, in separate petitions, appealed.
"It's just hard for people to accept that their kids may be better off somewhere else and they just fight it, even though they don't do anything to get them back," said Onzlee Ware, the mother's attorney. "But when it comes to children, if your behavior comes in conflict with the best interest of raising your kids, their best interest should come first."
At a National Foster Parent Association conference in Michigan two weeks ago, members spoke of states' too quickly returning foster children to their homes.
"The law says the child must be returned as quickly as possible to the family. ... The agencies often return them too soon and they're abused over and over and over," Cora White, a foster parent from Madison, Wis., and the association's president, said in an Associated Press article.
Social service workers argued that returning children to their biological family usually is in their best interest, even if the family is still troubled. But some foster parents said children suffer while social service agencies and the court system give biological families chances to improve conditions at home.
Linda Donlan, president of the Virginia Foster Care Association, was among the 2,000 foster parents from across the country who attended the conference. Donlan, of Chesterfield County, shared members' concerns.
"It seems the way the system is now, parents' rights are protected more than the children's," Donlan said in an interview last week. "The courts look very strongly at the family ties and will return a child back to a biological parent even if it is not in the best interest of the child. They do it strictly because of blood ties."
Donlan concedes that the foster parents' view is a biased one.
"Foster parents are going to tell you it's wrong the way children are returned to abusive situations," she said. "If there were a three-strikes-and-you're-out law for parents, a lot of foster parents would vote for it. A lot of them will tell you that child should never go back, that parents should never be allowed to see that child again."
Virginia laws, Donlan said, are no different from those of any other state. Horror stories such as Tommy's and Jenny's are in the minority, she said.
"But if one child is being harmed, that's one child too many."
Virginians for Child Abuse Prevention reported 43 child deaths from abuse or neglect in 1993, up from 32 the year before.
The last known time a parent's neglect or abuse resulted in a child's death in Roanoke was in 1988.
Sarah Ruth Tullos, then 23, pleaded guilty to killing her 17-month-old daughter, Helen Dawn, with a back-handed punch to the stomach. The child died from internal bleeding.
Child Protective Services workers had investigated at least two previous reports of possible child abuse in Tullos' home, including a broken leg suffered by Helen's twin sister.
"I never knew anything like this happened in Roanoke," said Becky, Tommy's foster mother. "This is what happens in Chicago and Washington, not right here in Roanoke."
Two months ago, the plight of 18 children found in a grimy, roach-infested Chicago apartment drew national attention to child neglect.
But that case attracted attention only because of the number of children involved, Clark said.
"We have cases in this area where homes have been similarly dirty," Clark said. The Chicago case "wasn't any great revelation. That, unfortunately, is nothing new."
When Roanoke attorney Joseph Bounds fills a newly created seat on Juvenile and Domestic Relations Court, increasing the number of juvenile-court judges for the district to four, some changes will be made to improve the way these cases are handled, Clark said.
"We do recognize that children are remaining in limbo too long."
by CNB