Michigan: Another Child Beaten To Death In A Foster Home
Two-year-old Isaac Lethbridge died on August 16, 2006 because child welfare caseworkers took him from his parents and placed him in an unsafe foster home environment. He was beaten and burned while in state custody foster “care”. His fosterer, Charlsie Adams-Rogers, 59, is on trial for manslaughter.
According to a Detroit Free Press article, Adams-Rogers “had a history of complaints alleging mistreatment of children in her home. Though Child Protective Services never substantiated any of the nine complaints, people familiar with the child welfare system say the allegations should have raised red flags about what was going on in the brick home on Greenlawn in northwest Detroit.” But Adams-Rogers may not have been the one who inflicted the fatal blows. Her twelve-year-old daughter, one of three children Adams-Rogers adopted from foster care, stands accused of inflicting the final injury. There were at least seven children in the home at the time of Isaac’s death.
According to news reports, before his death Isaac’s child welfare caseworker was aware of bruises on the child, inflicted while he was in custody, but did nothing to move the child from his dangerous foster home or protect him from further injury. His sister, who had been placed in the same home, also bore the signs of injuries at the time of her younger brother’s death.
I’d like to say this is a unique situation, but tragically, it is not. Hundreds of children have died violently in foster homes, many at the hands of the adults paid to take care of them. Caseworkers often don’t remove children from abusive foster homes because there’s no financial motivation for the agency to do so. They remove children from their natural family homes much more readily because as soon as they do, federal financial streams are available to enrich the counties that detain children.
In Isaac’s case, his parents are accused of neglect due to poverty. They are not accused of abuse. He could have been better served by allowing the parents to learn to take appropriate care of their child while keeping custody of him. But now it is too late; he’s dead due to our country’s child welfare laws that destroy and harm nearly every family they affect.
According to an article in the Isaac Lethbridge file, he is the third child to die violently in a Michigan foster home within the last 18 months. Ricky Holland, age 7, was adopted out of foster care then killed by his adopters in July 2005. Allison Newman, age 2, died from blunt-force trauma injuries of unknown origin in September 2006. Apparently someone suggested she was “accidentally flung over a 12-foot balcony onto a hardwood floor.” Who, I ask, “accidentally” throws a 2-year-old over a balcony? Allison’s licensed foster ‘mother’ is jailed, charged with felony murder and involuntary manslaughter.
These children are the tip of the iceberg. An online memorial, In Memory of Children Protected to Death by CPS, posts dozens of names and photos of children who died in state custody foster homes in nearly every state of this nation. And these are only the ones that site owner, Suncana Sesic Alvarado, can find names and photos for. Many more children have died in foster homes without coming to the public’s attention.
[Note: I incorrectly wrote that the owner of the site was Charlie Whitman. I corrected this information on June 13, 2007. - LJM]
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I live in Cass County, Michigan. This scares me so much. My 3yr old son was living with his Aunt (my ex-husband’s sister), who had guardianship of him, and while I was trying to get him back CPS took him from her. And now my son is in foster care and CPS seems to fighting us with every step. They say they believe in family reunification, but they seem to find such little things that could stop that from happening. My ex husband called them and told them that my boyfriend and I are doing meth and marijuana with our 5month old son in the house. So now there is a whole seperate CPS case about my other child. They’re already threatening to take him away. I can’t afford a lawyer, all I have is a court appointed attorney and she seems to be fighting me as well. I feel so helpless. I don’t want to lose my boys. They are my life. I have never once hurt my children. I would die before I hurt them. It is sad to think that CPS will give a child back to crack addict, but they take away children from perfectly safe families.
Comment by Erin — August 13, 2007 @ 6:53 am
There’s another form of abuse in Michigan foster “care” that doesn’t get reported on and doesn’t show up on the stats pages. Medical neglect.
My son was born with renal tubular acidosis. One of the symptoms of this is failure to gain weight. Rather than do the proper testing, the state-funded medical center reported me to CPS for neglect when he was two months old (they said I was refusing to feed him).
After a month in foster “care”, someone took him to a doctor who was alarmed enough at his condition (he was, for all intents and purposes, dying - a condition he was *not* in before they took him away from me) that she sent him to Grand Rapids for an ultrasound of his kidneys. It was then that they realized he had RTA. The agency, however, kept this fact a secret from both the court and the state, denying my son medical treatment. They continued to say that his condition was because I didn’t feed him, even though he had been out of my custody for a month at that point.
I went to my lawyer about it and we went to court with a motion to take my son to a real doctor. The court accused me of being insane and wasting their time, but an order to take my son to a doctor was filed. The agency never did that, and no action was taken against them for disobeying a court order. My baby continued to waste away and I was forced to watch.
After six months in foster “care”, they started saying he was underweight because he saw me once a week and it “traumatized” him so badly that he refused to eat for the rest of the week (he was eight months old).
After a year, it was still my doing, but they gave up on even trying to explain why.
After about 17 months, I was accidentally sent his state immunization records which showed that he wasn’t being immunized properly (he hadn’t gained enough weight to be safely immunized). When I presented this to the court, CPS finally admitted that my son had RTA and started treating him (improperly, his current, not medicaid, U of M Healthcare System doctor says), but also used the fact that I even brought it up as proof that I was mentally ill.
They also did a complete 180 on his condition. When it was my fault, it was absolutely earthshattering. Once it became not my fault, it was, in the words of the prosecutor, “meaningless… no big deal”. It was the whole reason they took him away from me, and then suddenly it was “no big deal”.
Finally, after 21 months, they said that if I didn’t voluntarily terminate my parental rights, they would keep him in foster “care” where he would continue to not get proper treatment for his condition. To me, it was no different from holding a gun to his head and telling me that if I didn’t do what they wanted, they’d shoot him. At that point, it wasn’t about keeping him away from my family (they gave him to my mother almost immediately and got the hell away from the case as fast as they could) as it was about covering up their medical neglect and the fact that in order to keep telling their lie about me, they nearly killed a baby.
My son is two now, and he’ll never be the person he was born to be. He’s incredibly small for his age, can’t talk, and is lethargic most of the time. CPS, in essence, murdered the man my son was meant to be and left an empty little ghost in his place… for no other reason than to be able to tell a lie about me.
Comment by MJ — February 26, 2008 @ 7:28 pm
There have been unfortunate incidents with CPS, I agree, but think of all the children who have been sent TO warm, loving families FROM the abusive ones. There are many parents that harm their own children and don’t deserve to be parents. CPS helps these kids and sends them to a place where they don’t have to be scared anymore.
Comment by Ally D. — May 18, 2008 @ 4:53 pm