Magdalia Proft’s memories begin with the day she saw the police flashlights outside of the flat she shared with her mother and five younger siblings. She was 6 years old, but she was “in charge” and, sensing trouble, she hid her 4-year-old sister, Nydia, and 3-year-old brother, Antonio, under the bed. At 8 p.m., the inside temperature remained near 100 degrees. The only ventilation came from a fan Meg had aimed at 3-month-old Tessa, who was lying on a bed beside a screenless open window.
As hot as the July air was, Tessa was hotter. Meg had dissolved a Tylenol in water and was trying to feed it to the baby with an eyedropper. Another sister, 18-month-old Reina, lay in her own vomit, suffering from heat stroke. There was cocaine in both Reina and Tessa’s blood when they were born, but in Wisconsin, you can’t assume a child will be in danger simply because his or her mother is an addict. So Sinai Samaritan Medical Center warned child welfare officials, then sent the girls home.
Pus oozed from crusty abscesses on Reina’s head. Meg had tried to protect her from her mother’s rages, but Doris Davila’s anger was irrepressible. Perhaps, Meg says now, it was because out of the five different drug users and dealers who contributed to the creation of the 26-year-old Puerto Rican woman’s offspring, only Reina’s father was Caucasian.
When the police knocked, Meg told them that if she let them in, her mother would beat her. Davila might be back in hours or in days. She had “a serious cocaine and alcohol problem for years,” reported the neighbor who’d called police. The kids, she said, were “always alone.”
Someone located Meg’s brother, Emerito, 5, wandering in a nearby park. Davila was found downing a beer on a porch nine blocks away. Drunk and belligerent, according to the police report, she arrived as the ambulance carrying Reina and Tessa sped off toward Children’s Hospital.
From the social worker’s car, Meg saw her mother screaming and struggling with police, then dropping to her knees in a mud puddle. Police had three outstanding warrants for Davila’s arrest – disorderly conduct, vandalism and assault and battery – but the July 23, 1991 Milwaukee Journal headline read simply: “Police arrest mother of six in neglect case.”
Tony Madison is just 17, but it’s as if he’s already lived four lives. The first was with his mother, the second in foster care. A third was spent bouncing between temporary shelters and group homes. “And now,” he says.
Tony’s first life ended in January 1994. He’d been sharing a bedroom with nine other children, four families crammed into a filthy three-bedroom drug house.
“Every night, my mom wasn’t there, and the baby would cry and cry, and she’d say, ‘I will pay you if you watch the kids,’ and she’d give me food stamps, like two weeks later, when she’d remember. There was never milk. All I had was water, so I fed the baby instant oatmeal,” he says. “Me and my brothers, we were like our own little family, and I was the dad, starting when I was 4.… But mom always came home screaming, ‘You weren’t supposed to let them cry.’ And then she’d slap me… and I wished I was dead.”
Samuel Eckenrod has no memory of May 6, 1996, the day the government took over his care. His mother, Delores Marie Blake, had taken him to St. Mary’s Hospital, but when 6-week-old Sam was diagnosed with a potentially fatal blood infection, she insisted he didn’t need medical care. A nurse told child welfare officials Sam’s mother seemed “unable to comprehend her baby’s illness.” Blake had been moving from shelter to shelter, back and forth between Chicago and Milwaukee.
A product of the child welfare system herself, Blake had a history of mental illness stretching back to age 13. Officials had already taken her daughter, Se’Roled (Delores spelled backwards), into protective custody when she was 6 weeks old, but they had recently returned the 1-year-old to her.
Today, Meg is a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee nursing student. Tony is headed for the Job Corps. Sam is celebrating his 8th birthday with his permanent family. All three are success stories in a system that is supposed to look out for kids who’ve been abused, neglected or abandoned by their parents, a system that too often subjects them to more abuse and neglect.
Together, their three birth mothers produced 19 children. Meg, Tony and Sam got a second chance at life, but for some of their siblings, the child welfare system has been a luckless lottery. Three have died. One is in in-patient psychiatric care at age 9. At least two appear destined for prison.
In 2001, there were 38,672 cases of neglect and abuse involving state children. At least 18 died, according to the Department of Health and Family Services’ most recent Annual Report to the Governor and Legislature. Eight died in Milwaukee County, two in the state’s “protective custody.”
No one has high expectations for kids who wind up in the child welfare system. “A kid who made it out of high school and didn’t go to prison, that’s a great success for the system,” says attorney Susan Conwell, co-director of In Their Best Interest, an advocacy group for kids in out-of-home care. “He’s making it by not being homeless or involved with the criminal justice system” as either a victim or perpetrator. Conwell isn’t a cynic; she’s a realist. More than half of the 17-year-olds in foster care can’t read at a seventh-grade level; two-thirds of males and one-half of females have been arrested, convicted of a crime or sent to prison, according to a study just released by the University of Chicago.
“These kids have already been through a lot, and we want the foster care system to make up for it,” says Conwell. “It works sometimes, but we… keep making the same mistakes: not enough families willing to take challenging kids, not enough support for those who do, less public oversight than there used to be, the urge to cover up mistakes rather than address them head on.”
That’s why what Meg, Tony and Sam – and their new families – say is so important, because buried alongside child welfare’s best intentions and its biggest successes are its greatest flaws and young lives lost.
Little Mother Meg
Meg didn’t see her two baby sisters again for three years. “I was terrified.… How was I supposed to take care of them?” she asks, but under Wisconsin law, siblings caught in the child welfare system have no right to see each other. That is especially hard on “caretaker kids” like Meg, who tend to languish in the system, says Conwell.
Reina and Tessa had gone to the Washington County foster home of Mary Jane and Tom Proft, who have adopted 13 children, ages 3 to 36, a multicultural mélange of Korean, Chinese, Puerto Rican, African-American, Native American and Caucasian kids. The Profts have also parented 82 foster kids.
Reina and Tessa were lucky. Unlike many poor, uneducated foster parents in the system, Mary Jane wasn’t easily intimidated, nor was she dependent on her foster care reimbursement to keep a roof over her head. A former president of state and local foster parent associations, Proft says that “raising special-needs children… I had to be assertive… to the point of being a bitch.” Proft persuaded officials to provide therapy for Reina’s developmental delays and surgery to correct Tessa’s chronic ear infections.
The four oldest Davila children, including Meg, went to live with a relative, but when his prior felony conviction prevented him from becoming a foster parent, the boys went to one home, the girls to another. Meg was relieved. She and Emerito had been forced to kneel for hours on the pebbly kitchen floor and go without food for infractions as slight as a coat that fell from a hook.
But at the second home, “the beatings were worse,” says Meg. Her foster father began “touching” her while they were driving to school. When she told her foster mother, she and her sister, Nydia, were moved to the boys’ foster home. “The mother was physically very abusive,” says Meg. “She’d attack us with a broom. I’d get spankings, but Emerito would get these unimaginable beatings.… She’d beat us in front of everyone – the worst kind of humiliation. In front of her son, who was 16, her daughter… grandkids, strangers.… I knew if you said anything, you’d get it worse.
“One night, the son came into my room and began kissing me, touching me,” continues Meg. “I was frozen.… The grandma came in.… The next morning, the foster mother accused me, a 9-year-old, of asking him to do that.… I kept saying, ‘I didn’t. I swear,’ and she kept hitting me.”
At the foster parent’s request, Meg was moved to another South Side home. There, Meg remembers, she “felt like a princess. There were no more beatings. I could ask for money for a piece of candy without getting slapped across the face.” But then the foster father started coming into her room at night. “I would pretend to be asleep,” she says, while he sexually assaulted her. “He knew my old foster parents, and he said, ‘I know what happened in your other foster homes,’ and… that if his wife found out, I’d have to leave… and the next foster home might be worse.”
By 1995, Mary Jane Proft had arranged for all of the Davila children to spend some time together. Except for Meg, they all had prospective adoptive parents. The court ruled that their birth mother had failed to assume her parental responsibility, freeing Nydia, 7, and Tony, 6, to be adopted by their Sheboygan foster parents, who offered to take 9-year-old Emerito, too.
With their application to adopt Reina, 5, and Tessa, 4, pending, the Proft’s case manager leaned on them to take Meg as well. Her visits had gone well, but when the family took a vote, Mary Jane was the lone holdout. “Meg saved all of these kids’ lives,” she says, “but I was afraid she’d try to be their mother again.”
Then, too, the Profts had been told “a multitude of foster homes had a problem with Meg,” says Mary Jane. “Although it was Meg who actually had a problem with them,” 10-year-old Meg might have an attachment disorder, given her repeated moves. “If a child does, by age 8, it’s too late,” says Mary Jane. “Oftentimes, those children develop bizarre behavior. You don’t do ‘time out’ with an attachment-disordered child. You have to have set rules and follow through.”
But on August 12, 1994, Meg found herself at the Proft’s Germantown home. “Birds were chirping, the neighborhood was clean. It was beautiful,” Meg sighs. A large sign outside welcomed her. “Every time I trusted people, I got hurt,” says Meg. “It was hard to accept that this time I was safe.… Even now, I still find myself… afraid at night.”
A fourth-grader at the time, Meg was working at a first-grade level. And although Mary Jane brought her influence to bear in the form of extra help, Meg struggled.
That was not her only burden. Two years later, Mary Jane found Meg in a closet, huddled in a fetal position, sobbing so hard that her clothes were wet. For two hours, Meg recounted details of her sexual abuse. “I don’t know how anyone could survive that,” says Mary Jane, tears falling as she remembers.
Mary Jane had arranged for Meg to see a therapist before she was adopted. Years of therapy followed. Meg told police about her sexual abuse at previous foster homes and was examined by a doctor, she says, “but nothing ever happened.” She regrets not reporting the abuse sooner. “I could have saved the other foster girls,” she says.
In high school, Meg shared her secret in an essay she read to her composition class. “When I said I was sexually abused, there was a gasp,” she says. “Then silence.… That was the first time I realized I was no different than I was 30 seconds earlier. I don’t want to keep running from it.… I’m not going to let it take me down like some people do.”
A year ago, while attending the funeral of a cousin raised by her maternal grand-mother, whom Meg credits with “saving” her life by talking Doris out of an abortion, a stranger approached her. “Magdalia,” she said. “Don’t you know who I am?” Meg was there to console her grandmother, but it was her mother who wanted consoling. “Why didn’t you look for me?” she demanded. “Don’t you love me?”
“It was always all about Doris,” says Meg. “It was better when I didn’t know her, when she was in prison for stabbing some lady.”
Meg didn’t seem to want a new mother, but Mary Jane refused to give up, and Meg came to admire her fighting spirit. Meg bloomed into an effervescent student. She was elected to the homecoming court but opted for a previous engagement – speaking to a foster parents group. “Walking across a football field was so non-important compared to changing something real,” she says.
Meg learned that her brother, Emerito, was back in the foster home where “he’d been so horribly beaten.” He’d refused to move to Sheboygan; another adoption fell through because of his behavior. Meg phoned the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare’s hotline, warning, “I was beaten by the mother in that home and my brother was, too. That should be some kind of red flag.” The bureau never returned her call, she says.
Bureau Director Denise Revels Robinson says Emerito would go AWOL from other placements and return to the home where he lived from age 6 through age 10. Besides, says Revels Robinson, the bureau was “never able to substantiate” Meg’s allegations, nor another made about the home, and it still places children there.
Emerito had spent the month of his seventh Christmas in a psychiatric hospital being treated for depression and hyperactivity. At 10, he was confined again because of his anger over being abandoned and in long-term foster care. Emerito had been bright in school, but by ninth grade, he was hopelessly behind. “An unexcused absence of 20 days is grounds for neglect,” says Mary Jane Proft, but the bureau never acted, though social workers repeatedly documented Emerito’s truancy.
By 16, he was a gang member with a long rap sheet, including breaking and entering, theft, criminal damage to property and carrying a concealed weapon. In 2002, he was sent to Ethan Allen School for Boys. But when Meg called, she was told there was no record of her brother. Her continued efforts to find Emerito have been unsuccessful.
Today, Meg still lives with the Profts. She stays in touch with her other siblings, works in a hospital kitchen, attends college full time and still fights for foster kids. When Susan Dreyfus, former director of the state’s child welfare system, asked what it would take to make her think the system had changed, Meg told her: “Listen to the kids.… Make your social workers talk to the kids.”
The Profts still have eight adopted children at home and a new foster baby. Meg’s birth mother, Doris, has a new baby, too. When Meg heard about him, she called Doris.
“You’re going to screw up another child’s life,” Meg says she told her. “But Doris screamed, ‘This baby is my second chance.’ ”
Like the rest of Davila’s children, there’s no involved father. She traveled to Minneapolis to give birth. Officials there wouldn’t know her parental rights to five of her six previous children had been terminated, but back in Milwaukee, Meg turned Davila in to the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare. Meg even found a family willing to adopt the boy, but bureau personnel told her there was “no guarantee” he’d go there. He might end up in the same kinds of homes she did.
That was when their conversation stopped. Davila still has the baby.
Tony’s Hope
Tony studied the way his mother devoured The Star. He desperately wanted to read, but when he asked when he could go to school, “she said she couldn’t afford it,” he remembers. He saved to buy himself a book – money he got from one of his brother’s uncles, a drug dealer who was “kind of like a father to me when he wasn’t in prison and before he was released and murdered,” says Tony. “But my mom always stole it.”
One day, running home from the store, Tony was nearly struck by a squad car. He should have been in second grade but hadn’t attended a single day. The cop confronted his mother, Ann Madison. Afterward, “It was the worst whupping I ever got,” says Tony. “She was drinking, and I said, ‘I’m sorry I told him,’ and she said, ‘Just remember, Mama loves you.’ That’s her famous quote, but she was never a mother to me. She never read me bedtime stories or tucked me in at night.”
Madison brought her “boyfriends” home, “a different guy every other day,” Tony recalls. “I don’t know who my daddy is. My two sisters and four brothers and me had seven different daddies.” His mother’s “dates” would beat her up, and Tony would try to stop them, he says, but he’d get beat up, too, until his godmother called foster care. “If she didn’t,” he says, “I wouldn’t be alive today because they were all gang members.”
Milwaukee County had already received seven reports of abuse and neglect involving Madison’s kids. She had “given” her oldest, 8-year-old Shaniqua, to her mother. The county had removed another, born prematurely, and placed her with the grandmother, too. For eight years, child welfare workers tried to stabilize the home. They sent 25-year-old Madison to nine drug and alcohol abuse treatment programs; she failed them all.
But in December 1993, she called, asking for help. Her drinking was “out of control,” she said. She couldn’t care for her kids. There was no evidence she got another referral for treatment, says a former social worker. One month later, Madison had a second dead son.
The first, 1-year-old John Cook, died in 1991; his death was blamed on Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, although Tony, then 5, remembers “my mother was on the couch with my little brother. She was drunk, and he went between the cushion and her and suffocated. My mom woke up screaming, ‘Your brother is dead!… I’m not having kids again,’ ” Tony says, but she did. And on January, 9, 1994, one month shy of his first birthday, Tony’s little brother Devonte was dead, too. Tony found him.
“Devonte suffocated, too, under the couch cushion,” he remembers. “His lips were cold and blue, and I tried to give him CPR, but his body was hard. I took him to my brother’s grandmother – she drinks, too – and she said, ‘What do you want? Get your mother,’ but she was naked with a guy.… I was crying, ‘I took care of him his whole life!’ ”
Ann Madison was at the police station when social workers took her surviving sons. She was never charged in Devonte’s death. However, there was “evidence of substantial neglect and physical and sexual abuse” involving Tony, 71⁄2, and his brothers, Antwone, 6, and Jamel, 4.
Tony was diagnosed with malnutrition, depression and attention deficit disorder. Jamel and Antwone had lead poisoning. Scars covered their bodies; someone counted 124 on Jamel. Antwone was “a wild, violent, angry child” who never spoke. Jamel was “self-abusive, destructive and exhibited bizarre, aggressive behavior,” a social worker wrote.
The boys destroyed their first foster home and attacked anyone who intervened. All three needed inpatient psychiatric care.
On Valentine’s Day 1994, a county worker introduced the boys to their new foster parent, the Rev. Lillie R. Lagrant, who lived in a comfortable middle-class home on the Northwest Side with her 16-year-old son. Tony finally began school – in the middle of second grade. “I loved it,” he says. It almost didn’t matter that he failed or got into fights when kids made fun of his shabby clothes. “I was so angry,” he says.
Lagrant, a Pentecostal minister, kindled more anger in Tony. “She beat us with belts, cords and curtain rods. She made us get branches with thorns, and if they weren’t big enough, she’d have her son saw off a bigger one. He would say, ‘You’re not going to live very long, so don’t get your hopes up.’
“She’d beat us like slaves if we missed a strip of dust cleaning… beat our hands with hair brushes until they swole [sic] up.… We had to eat on the floor, like a dog.… Her kid was at that table with her, but I never got to eat at the table unless a social worker was there, and then… she’d say, ‘Get up. Why would you eat on the floor?’ But Ms. Lagrant told us, ‘If you tell your social worker anything, you’ll never see your mom again.’ ”
In 1997, the state hired Tanner Kilander, a 21-year-old newly minted social worker, to “pick up child welfare cases that had piled up at the county, untouched for years,” she recalls. Her first involved the Madison boys. But when Kilander tried to visit, “it took months to get inside.” Then, Lagrant told her she was a “minister of god” and the boys were ‘devil spawn.’ ” Jamel had stabbed a bus driver. Tony had been suspended. Lagrant left Kilander alone with the younger boys but took Tony, saying he’d bitten the previous social worker, and she’d needed stitches.
At every turn, Lagrant demanded more money for caring for the boys, says Kilander. “She was getting the maximum… plus a supplement because of the boys’ behavior, but she gave me 30 days.… I called her bluff.”
Lagrant had told the boys their mother didn’t love them. Kilander tried to reassure them by arranging a meeting. “The boys looked awful,” she remembers. Ann Madison came “all dressed up.” The boys were “all bent on returning home,” says Kilander.
Driving to their new foster home in Madison, Tony sobbed. “Hell was over,” he says. But then all hell broke loose. Kilander spent Christmas Day trying to arrange support for the foster family. Jamel was suicidal. The boys ate “until they doubled over with stomach pains,” Kilander recorded. “After several weeks of… plenty of food… this behavior began to decrease for Tony and Jamel. Antwone, however, continued to binge.” The boys had nightmares and averaged “three hours of sleep a night.… They exhibited inappropriate sexual conduct with each other.”
The boys were placed in three separate psychiatric wards. The “little guy started talking about abuse and his mom, and we didn’t know which mom,” says Kilander. It was “Ms. Lagrant.… Then [she] wouldn’t send them to school, so no one would report her.” Jamel missed 40 days in half a year.
“There are reports of physical torture, including being tied up and beaten and having their naked genitals pinched with clothespins,” the court file says. Mrs. Lagrant was “uncooperative. The children were referred to a number of services, but [she]… refused to enroll them.… Unfortunately, this went on for four years before child welfare officials became aware of it.”
After 18 months, Kilander resigned to go back to school. Tony “clung to my arm and begged me not to leave, to take him home with me. He promised to sleep on the floor, eat only bologna, not touch anything.… It was the most difficult day of my professional life,” she says. Out of countless social workers, “she was the only one who… listened,” he says.
Despite her report, Kilander says, no independent investigation ever occurred. Lagrant was never charged, although Kilander filed papers to make sure she never got another foster child in Milwaukee County.
Kilander found Tony a foster home in Whitefish Bay, where things went relatively well for nearly three years. The foster mother helped him work through his anger, but when he refused to follow house rules, she had him removed. Embarrassed because everyone at his new Milwaukee school knew he lived in a shelter, he’d leave, spending afternoons at a Bay Shore mall bookstore.
After finishing law school, Kilander tried to check on Tony, but all of her former colleagues were gone, and she had no legal right to know his whereabouts. It took six months to find him. He was in danger of not graduating from eighth grade because he’d missed so much school. She bribed him to go, and they started meeting regularly. The day he graduated, Tony moved into the Kilanders’ just-licensed foster home in Oconomowoc.
That was three years ago. Tony went from getting Fs to being an average student in regular classes instead of classes for emotionally disturbed kids.
His brothers, Antwone and Jamel, never did find a stable home. They spent a decade moving between temporary placements. Then, in April 2003, the bureau sent them home. Madison was still drinking, but the bureau got her an apartment.
Tony became their caretaker again, says Tanner. “He visited frequently… was a wreck trying to keep his mom’s and brothers’ behavior on track… afraid his mom would try to kill herself if the boys were taken away.”
He experimented with beer and marijuana and went to Madison’s house without telling his foster parents. Finally, with his social worker threatening to move him, Tony signed himself into Rogers Memorial Hospital’s psychiatric unit last August. He emerged four days later, asking the Kilanders to adopt him.
After all that’s happened, “Ki and Tanner still love me,” Tony said in January. “I love my [birth] mother, but I can’t go back because then it will start all over again.… My mom is an alcoholic, and that’s not going to change no matter what the state or county does.… Most foster kids don’t do anything with their lives… but Tanner believed in me.…”
A sobbing Ann Madison voluntarily terminated her parental rights to Tony, clearing the way for his adoption. That same January day, the bureau closed Madison’s case, ending her housing subsidy.
Jamel, 14, was in a residential school where he seemed to be turning his life around, but in March, the D.A. charged 16-year-old Antwone with three felonies, including the sexual assaults of two young girls.
Things began to unravel for Tony, too. The Oconomowoc High School social worker told Kilander it was as if Tony was “trying to get kicked out of school,” and he was expelled for repeated fighting. Tony says he was constantly taunted by racist remarks. But Tanner believes Tony’s youngest brother “accused him of abandoning them,” she says.
Tony no longer wanted to be adopted. In March, his social worker moved him to a foster home closer to his brothers. He hopes to enter the Job Corps.
Tony turns 18 on August 12. If he is not making progress toward receiving a high school degree by the time he’s 19, the bureau will close his case, too.
Sam’s Story
Samuel Russell was not an easy child to love, even at age 3. He had bouts of bad behavior – fighting, pulling hair, running into walls on purpose. Twice, his foster mother ended up in the emergency room, wounded by flying objects – a hailstorm of Matchbox cars, a TV shaken off of a cabinet. His foster father had to take family leave to help control him, costing the family $20,000 in lost income.
In one classic episode, while sitting in a cart at the JC Penney Outlet store check-out, Sam erupted over a bag of candy, shouting obscenities. Marilynn Wall-Eckenrod heard the clucks of “disapproval” behind her.
“This is Sam,” she said, turning toward the hot eyes boring into her back, “and I’m his foster mother. The state pays me $289 a month to take care of him – that includes his food and clothing. I’m recruiting, so if anyone wants to be a foster parent.…”
Wall-Eckenrod, 54, and her husband, Gary Eckenrod, 49, have raised 13 children, ages 17 to 32, including two adopted Korean girls. But nothing prepared them for Sam, since diagnosed with interactive explosive disorder, ADHD and reactive attachment disorder. Medications used to treat bi-polar disorder have now moderated Sam’s behavior. In fact, it’s hard to believe he was ever difficult, as he leaves his toys and hurries to say good-bye to a guest, hugging the stranger.
It was not an easy road getting there.
Samuel Russell came to live with the Eckenrods on Milwaukee’s Northwest Side on May 22,1996. Almost immediately, “it was clear this little guy had a multitude of problems,” Marilynn recalls, including difficulty swallowing and projectile vomiting.
But “every time I asked for special services for Sam, I was told, ‘You got him when he was 46 days old – what could be wrong?’ As if his genetics didn’t matter,” she says. Case managers threatened that if the Eckenrods couldn’t manage Sam, they’d move him.
Child welfare officials removed Sam’s 18-month-old sister, Se’Roled, from his mother’s care a second time, then moved her again when her foster mother became ill. Delores Marie Blake had given birth to another daughter, Samon, and, pushed by an aggressive social worker, she tackled the court’s conditions for Sam and Se’Roled’s return. A psychological exam showed Delores was schizophrenic, the worker noted. “Faced with stress,” she “regressed to a disorganized level of functioning.”
But Delores attended 10 therapy sessions with no follow-up required. She passed an addiction screening and a parenting class.
She enrolled in the state’s welfare-to-work program but didn’t find a job. The longest Delores had worked as an adult had been five years at a McDonald’s. She’d held jobs as a school bus driver, childcare worker and Sunday school teacher, too, but nothing lasted more than six months. Now, Delores, living off of disability payments for her mental condition, considered herself on “maternity leave.”
Following the court’s order, she spent 16 hours in supervised visits with Sam and Se’Roled in 1998. Both Delores and Wall-Eckenrod were worried about Se’Roled. The “pleasant little girl” had become quiet and withdrawn. A year older than Sam, her development lagged seriously behind his. She arrived for visits with her hair uncombed, her clothes too small. A case manager is legally required to report suspected abuse or neglect, but the bureau found nothing wrong.
An abuse allegation involving Se’Roled’s foster mother from another source was never substantiated either. But in 1999, the bureau did find that the foster mother neglected one child and physically abused another. The woman appealed, and a hearing examiner upheld the neglect finding. Yet the bureau left foster children in the home, including Se’Roled, who remained for three and a half years. The case manager even began helping the woman adopt Se’Roled.
But a new social worker discovered that the 5-year-old had fallen years behind on her immunizations, substantiating neglect, and when she learned it was not the foster mother’s first, she went to Bureau Director Revels Robinson, who says she said, “ ‘Get those children out of that home.’ Things like this don’t happen very often, and shouldn’t.”
Removed from her third foster home, Se’Roled was fighting and “acting out sexually.” No foster home wanted her. The case manager recommended a psychiatric evaluation for the kindergartner and that “steps be taken to return her to her birth mother.”
But Se’Roled and Sam only saw their mother once in 1999. That was the year Delores, then 29, married their father, Samuel Russell Sr.. He was a sometimes window washer on disability for a shoulder injury and frequently in jail for traffic violations, disorderly conduct, theft and bail-jumping.
On May 24, 1999, Delores showed up at the social worker’s office with a paper bag over her head. It read, “AKA Funky D” and “Somebody help! We’re broke.” A sign hung around her new baby’s neck: “Hi! I’m Pumpkin.” Delores was “irrational and confused,” according to the worker’s account, and admitted “she couldn’t take care of” 2-year-old Samon or 5-month-old Robert. Delores was transported to the Milwaukee County Mental Health Complex, but she checked herself out, saying she didn’t need help.
The bureau described the children as “well adjusted and displaying no behavioral problems” and placed them in foster care. They stayed 20 months, when, court files reveal, they were removed because of confirmed abuse and neglect. For a second time, the Russell children had suffered in the bureau’s care. Their behavior had deteriorated, too.
“The case manager couldn’t find anyone who would take them,” Wall-Eckenrod remembers. “This is how the system works – they get a kid and put him in a home where they screw him up bad, until you really have an out-of-control child, and then they give him back to the birth parent.”
And that is what the bureau did. It had already returned Se’Roled. Now it recommended that Samon and Robert go home, too. The judge ordered an obviously pregnant Delores to give “social workers access to her living quarters on both announced and unannounced visits.” He instructed the children’s guardian ad litem to “monitor mom’s treatment plan” for six months.
One month later, Delores left the children with a man she barely knew, Wall-Eckenrod says, a man subsequently charged with child abuse, while she gave birth to Ian Jamal Russell. The bureau, however, did not put the newborn under a protective court order, as it had with the four older children.
“Under the state’s statutes, authorities do not have to wait for harm to occur to a child,” says Milwaukee County Juvenile Court Chief Judge Christopher Foley. “Substantial risk of harm is sufficient.” Foley has no involvement with the Russell case, but says, “I have significant concerns about the risk calculations made in this case. I am also concerned that we did not reach permanency for these children in a timely manner. For that, all of us, top to bottom, share the blame.”
But Revels Robinson refuses to accept any of it. She says Delores met “all of the court’s conditions for the children’s return.… We continued to monitor the home on a monthly basis.… The worker found ‘no pattern of neglect.’ ”
Given the bureau’s experience with the Russell family, having removed three previous infants – two at 6 weeks and another at 5 months – there had to be substantial cause for concern. Yet no action was taken to prevent what came next.
On April 27, 2001, police responded to a call at the Russell home. Seven-week-old Ian Russell, who shared a sofa bed with his three older siblings, was dead. An otherwise healthy infant, Ian’s left main artery had been crushed, according to the autopsy, perhaps by a sibling rolling on top of him.
Wall-Eckenrod does not blame Delores. “On a good day, she can maybe take care of herself,” she says. “But I am so angry at a system of well-educated, highly paid professionals who just close their eyes and say, ‘It’s not my job.’ Even a moron could have seen the warning signs in this case.”
Nine months later, Se’Roled, 6, had been moved to her sixth foster home, where she was displaying “problem sexual behavior”; substantial delays in her speech, reading and comprehension; and acting up in school.” Samon and Robert remained with Delores, who, according to the case manager, was “an excellent caregiver,” although there had been “poor cooperation… in completing her court-ordered [psychiatric] therapy.” But the bureau would “continue monitoring.”
Meanwhile, it had taken nearly two years for Sam’s adoption to become final. Sam’s birth father surrendered his parental rights by failing to appear in court. His mother demanded a jury trial. A unanimous 12-member jury found that she had “failed to assume parental responsibility,” grounds for termination. In the nearly six years Sam had been in foster care, Delores had spent just 28 hours and 45 minutes with him, by Wall-Eckenrod’s careful accounting. The judge ruled that the termination of parental rights (TPR) was in Sam’s best interest. Delores’ court-appointed attorney appealed twice on her behalf, but the ruling was upheld.
Wall-Eckenrod says that from the time Sam came to live with them, “we were fighting for his life. If Sam had stayed in the system, he’d be dead. With his behavior problems, someone would have killed him.”
The rest of the Russell children haven’t been so lucky. Ian is buried in an unmarked grave at Wisconsin Memorial Park. It would cost $872 for a headstone, money Wall-Eckenrod wishes she could afford.
On July 31, 2002, the bureau formally closed the Russell case. The children were “all doing well in their mother’s care,” says Revels Robinson, according to the case worker’s last contact with Delores, a phone call made three months earlier.
The very day the bureau closed the case, Delores’ recently divorced husband abandoned 5-year-old Samon and 7-year-old Se’Roled at a federal building in Milwaukee, telling a security guard the family could no longer care for them. The guard called the bureau’s hotline, and Delores picked up the girls. She took them home to a subsidized housing in Waukesha County, where she had been living for six years.
Nearly four months later, officials at Se’Roled and Samon’s school called police. Bruises and marks made by a metal belt buckle covered the girls’ upper bodies, necks and heads. According to police, Delores had beaten the children “over several days.”
Waukesha County placed the children in foster homes, and the district attorney charged Delores with two counts of felony child abuse; she pleaded guilty to one and received five years’ probation. Assistant D.A. Brad D. Schimel, who prosecuted the case last November, says the kids are “headed for TPRs and will be adopted.” But Delores’ attorney, Ryan Harrington, says, “Hopefully, next November, we’ll be back in court showing she’s met the conditions to get the kids back.”
Last February, just shy of her ninth birthday, Se’Roled was receiving long-term in-patient psychiatric care for her “anger and behavior problems.” According to Harrington, “She was seriously affected by what happened in the criminal case.” In March, Delores opened her home as a nonprofit for “homeless, helpless” men.
Meanwhile, Wall-Eckenrod’s repeated efforts to intervene on Robert’s behalf, including a letter saying the Eckenrods are willing to open their “hearts and home” to their son’s brother, have been ignored by Waukesha officials. “There is no one better equipped to handle the problems of the Russell children,” Marilynn wrote, adding, “SO WHY IS EVERYONE FIGHTING US?”
“These children have been in out-of-home placements for more than 15 of the last 22 months,” she says. “These children need to get on with their lives.”
Whether that will happen remains to be seen.
Epilogue
When Milwaukee Magazine set out to tell these “success stories,” it did not anticipate the darker side of the families’ cases. But Meg, Tony and Sam’s stories show the chronic nature of the problems the child welfare system faces, and how, seven years after the state took responsibility for Milwaukee County’s abused, neglected and abandoned children – a move designed to stave off a federal lawsuit brought by New York-based Children’s Rights Inc., alleging that the state and county failed to protect kids in their care – many of the same problems remain. In fact, the number of kids in out-of-home care, and decreased case loads, may be only a function of the state’s failure to identify kids in need of protection. In Milwaukee County, the state substantiates abuse and neglect reports at just half the national average.
Yet state bureaucrats seem to regard their takeover as a success. They call the changes necessitated by last winter’s failed federal review “enhancements,” not “improvements,” the term other states use. It’s a subtle form of denial, but substantial change only happens when you admit it’s needed.
Meg, Tony and Sam’s stories prove that bad beginnings can be overcome but that second chances are most likely to go to kids who have someone who fights for them, to kids who get the right support and services before it is too late.
All three still carry heavy baggage. There will be setbacks. But out of failure and anger, the energy needed to make real improvements – not mere “enhancements” – can emerge. They are better off today than their siblings, whose lives seem to have been squandered, in part, by the system designed to save them.
“They say they’ve changed the child welfare system, but they haven’t, not enough,” says Meg Proft. “I want change for all the other kids, not just the few who get lucky like I did. And I’m going to get that change, because I won’t stop until I do.”
Mary Van de Kamp Nohl is a senior editor of Milwaukee Magazine.
Good News and Bad
Here’s the good news:
The era of warehousing kids in foster care is over. In the past, abused, neglected and abandoned kids often spent their entire lives in foster care, waiting for their parents to assume their responsibility.
“That is now the exception, not the rule,” says Milwaukee County Juvenile Court Chief Judge Christopher Foley. Because “when kids are allowed to linger in foster care, only very bad things happen.”
Judges in Milwaukee County didn’t always talk this way. They found comfort in never having to make the hard decision – to sever a bad relationship and free a child for adoption. But last year, there were a record 704 terminations of parental rights and 584 adoptions in Milwaukee County – not enough to pass a federal review released last February. But then, 42 other states flunked, too.
The new mindset is what’s encouraging, and it owes both to Foley’s leadership and the 1997 Federal Adoption and Safe Families Act, which requires officials to terminate parents’ rights when their child has been in out-of-home care for 15 of the past 22 months because the parent has failed to meet the court’s conditions for the child’s return: things like finding a job and appropriate housing, taking parenting classes, getting psychological counseling or successfully completing drug or alcohol abuse treatment.
But here’s the bad news:
Judges won’t free kids when there’s no one to adopt them. And there aren’t enough of those people. Why not? Not for lack of a heart-warming TV campaign to recruit more foster parents, who account for more than 75 percent of all adoptive parents. (The 2003-’04 campaign has found few recruits.) To figure out why we don’t have more good foster parents, you need to look at how we treat those we do have.
But it’s important to realize which kids wind up in foster care. In 2003, the state poured $6 million into Safety Services to keep Milwaukee County kids who are at risk of being abused or neglected safe at home, but only when parents cooperate. (After a study showed the program worked, the state referred one-third fewer families.)
Children who are removed from their homes “have much, much more serious needs, as do their parents: substance abuse issues, mental health issues… housing and healthcare problems,” says Denise Revels Robinson, director of the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare.
But, she says, caseloads for social workers dealing with these families have dropped since the state-run bureau took over for Milwaukee County seven years ago – going from 20 to 25 families per caseworker to an average of 11. Yet the turnover rate for these social workers is actually worse today than it was 10 years ago.
It’s hard to imagine any organization functioning, as the bureau did in 2003, with 51.2 percent of case managers leaving, according to an internal review released in March. (Turnover in 1994 was 28 percent.) Average on-the-job tenure is just 30 months, according to University of Chicago researcher Mark Courtney.
“More experienced workers move into Safety Services, where they have more services… available… where they feel they can make more of a difference,” explains Revels Robinson. This leaves the least experienced workers responsible for the most troubled kids and their foster families.
The job would exhaust anyone, but a sample of workers and supervisors who left last year told Milwaukee Magazine they were unable to deliver services families needed. Most believed their superiors vetoed their requests on the basis of cost alone. (Private contractors now handle all of these cases.)
Courtney’s findings seem to corroborate this. He found that both foster and birth parents – those with the most contact with a child – were far more likely than case managers – who need a supervisor’s approval – to indicate that a child needed counseling, mental health or medical services – measures designed to improve a child’s behavior, school performance, health and help maintain positive foster placements. According to the caregivers Courtney surveyed, only one-third of children needing medical services and half of those needing mental health services actually received them before their cases were closed.
Is there any wonder then that there’s a shortage of good foster parents when, if the going gets tough, they (and the child) are likely to go it alone?
Three Ways You Can Help
1. Contact In Their Best Interests Inc. at 344-1220 for a listing of community-wide opportunities. Become a court-appointed special advocate for youth in care. Tutor, mentor or provide respite care for foster children. Donate books, clothing, music lessons or money to cover sports participation fees and other opportunities.
2. Become a foster parent (264-5437).
3. Join Voices United, a support group for adoptive, foster and kinship care parents. Meg Proft is the group’s youth adviser. Call co-president Dawn Kiltz at 262-569-5138.
How Many Kids in Foster Care?
Last year, there were 3,489 children in out-of-home care in Milwaukee County, nearly half the number there were five years earlier, yet reports of abuse and neglect made to the Bureau of Milwaukee Child Welfare’s 220-SAFE hotline increased by 2,031 over 2003, for a total of 17,035. Still, the bureau took 27 percent fewer children into protective custody. “Milwaukee County used to have a reputation for taking too many children from their families,” says Juvenile Court Chief Judge Christopher Foley, “but now I worry about the pendulum swinging too far the other way.”
