Those publicized pleas for more foster “parents” are an open invitation to child predators who want to harm other people’s children in an unsupervised living arrangement.

Here we have yet another case that proves this point:

“Bergthold admitted that during the time he acted as a foster parent for the Arkansas Department of Human Services, he had sexual contact with and produced several photos and videos of a minor who had been placed in Bergthold’s care and custody.”

“Bergthold also pleaded guilty on the same day to a one-count criminal information filed in the District of Oregon, which was later transferred to the Western District of Arkansas, that charged a separate incident of production of child pornography in Oregon.”

Source: Former Foster Parent Sentenced for Production and Transportation of Child Pornography published by Market Watch, the online version of The Wall Street Journal, on Aug. 21, 2008.

Lynn Paddock, 47, and her husband, Johnny, adopted six children from foster care. For people who adopt so many, I use the term “child collectors”. Now Johnny has divorced Lynn and she is on trial for suffocating four-year-old Sean.

Lynn Paddock is accused of suffocating Sean by wrapping him in blankets so tightly that he couldn’t breathe. She allegedly did this to keep him from wandering around in the hallways. She is also accused of using tape to bind another adopted child. She may stand trial for first-degree murder and child abuse at the same time.

Sean’s grandparents are suing the Paddocks and the social services agencies who placed him with her. Although my source article didn’t state it, I wonder if this is one of those cases where the social services agency refused to place the child with his grandparents. He was originally placed with an aunt and uncle, but was taken from them and sent to foster care. The article states, “The case has revealed flaws in the state’s child welfare system.”

Source: Adoptive mother to stand trial in son’s suffocation - AP article published in The Fayetteville Observer on May 19, 2008.

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Written by Linda Martin for Fight CPS.

Allison Newman’s mother wanted to recover from an addiction to crack cocaine, so she asked an acquaintance to watch her six month old baby temporarily. When Michigan social workers got into the act, the baby ended up in the home of Carol Poole, 42, a barren woman living in an expensive upscale home, who wanted children. She has now been convicted of murdering Allison when she was only two.

Allison’s grandfather, Kenneth Newman said:

• “She cracked that baby’s skull open, dressed her and put her to bed to die.”
• “People (child welfare workers) turned their heads because these people lived out in Canton and had a few dollars in the bank.”
• “There was evidence that Allison started being abused seven or eight weeks before her death. When Ann (the girl’s mother) went into rehab, the date to sever parental rights got postponed and Carol Poole realized she wasn’t going to get to adopt Allison. We think that’s when everything went bad.”

(Source: Doug Guthrie of The Detroit News - see link below.)

Carol Poole has now been convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 25 to 30 years in prison. She also got 10 to 15 years for child abuse.

Quoting from Guthrie’s article:

“During her trial, two workers at the Childtime Learning Center day care in Plymouth said they noticed scratches and bruises on Allison long before her death. They reported the findings to their supervisor, who was charged but not convicted of failing to comply with state law by reporting the injuries.”

During 2005 and 2006 three children died in Michigan foster and adoptive homes: Allison Newman, Issac Lethbridge, and Ricky Holland.

Source: Foster mother gets 20-35 years in prison for girl’s death - by Doug Guthrie, written for The Detroit News, published February 27, 2008.

A nineteen-year-old soldier, Michael Vick, was arrested at the airport in Texas upon arriving home fom Iraq. His father, James Vick, 44, was arrested in May and is still in custody. Apparently two girls who used to live with the Vick family as foster children say the men sexually assaulted them, and law enforcement authorities believe them.

The sexual assaults allegedly took place at various times in 2003 and 2004. The girls were only eight and nine years old at that time.

This family must have been heavily invested in the foster care industry, as the authorities say they’re now interviewing more than fifty other foster children who lived with the family since the mid 1990’s.

Source: East Texas Soldier & Father Arrested For Alleged Sexual Assault Of Foster Children, published July 19, 2007, Palestine, Texas.

Carole Deleon is getting off easy after pleading guilty to criminal mistreatment of a little boy she adopted out of foster care, then starved to death. She also mistreated at least one other foster child.

Tyler was starved, bruised, had teeth knocked out, drugged with various medications, and denied water. He died on his seventh birthday.

Deleon was originally charged with murder, but a plea bargain has reduced her sentence to what will probably be only six years.

Florence Moyle’s nephew, Steven, also lived with Deleon. They believe Deleon should have been tried for murder, and Steven was willing to testify. Moyle is planning protests outside the Stevens County Courthouse and a Seattle law firm is preparing a lawsuit against the state of Washington.

Six months before Tyler’s death there was a CPS report stating that “the children in the Deleon home were at high risk for future abuse and neglect” yet the caseworkers left Tyler and four other children there, and placed a three-month-old baby in her home. This is another case of CPS choosing to ignore evidence of abuse in a foster home.

Source: DeLeon faces sentencing Friday, published July 20, 2007.

A foster child confided in her teenage cousins about sexual abuse she endured. The abuser was a man paid by the government to take care of her: foster parent Ronald Lee Pence, 49, of Prunedale, California.

Child abusers, especially sexual predators, have an open invitation to get close to children by becoming foster parents. As foster parents, they have daily round-the-clock access to the children of others, and can victimize them at will. To add to this sick situation, many CPS workers seem to ignore reports of foster parent abuse of foster children, as it will not increase county funding when a child is removed from a foster home. The county gets more federal funding only when they remove children from natural family homes and place them in foster care.

In this case the foster parent also pleaded guilty to dissuading a witness as when the girl said she wanted to tell her mother and the police about the abuse, he tried to talk her out of it. Pence will be sentenced on August 29. In the meantime, they’ve let this predator go free. He’s out on bail.

Source: Guilty plea in Prunedale molestation

“The system is maxed,” Patrick Crimmins said. “The system as designed, depending on your point of view, either cannot or will not absorb more children.”

Because foster care providers refuse to house hundreds of foster children, the children are forced to sleep in hotels or even in CPS offices.

Rather than admitting that far too many of the children in the state’s custody have been unjustly and unfairly taken from viable and loving parents, Crimmins, who is spokesman for the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, blames the current crisis on a law that allows foster parents to refuse children, and on the children themselves, some of whom are labeled “severely disturbed”.

Are the children “severely disturbed” because they’ve been unfairly ripped from loving parents? Are they “severely disturbed” because of childhood mental illnesses that the parents were trying to control when they lost custody? What’s the story behind having so many homeless “severely disturbed” children in the state’s care?

I’d be disturbed too if I was taken from my parents by state-paid ‘do-gooders’ and forced into homelessness with strangers. And do they really expect children to take this kind of abusive treatment, and remain calm? What does this say about our society that we allow such cruelty to exist against the most helpless citizens, the children?

Meanwhile Texas legislators may pass laws forcing foster care providers to take children they don’t want.

“Allowing providers to pick and choose among foster children and the services they deliver undermines the entire foster care system,” Comptroller Carole Keeton Strayhorn said, adding, ”It also puts caseworkers in a bind when contractors can dictate which children they will serve.”

Source: Kids sleep in CPS offices after foster-care rejection

This morning I opened one of my Google news alerts on the topic, “foster parents,” and found only two articles listed. Both are about men accused of taking advantage of the foster care system to exploit and abuse children.

Sadly, this is very common. In my years of scanning news articles for inclusion in my blog at FightCPS.Com, I’ve come across hundred of similar stories. The oddest was about a supposed foster mother in Pennsylvania who was actually a transvestite gay child predator.

One of today’s article alerts is about a 48-year-old man who has been sentenced to 18 months in prison for sexually abusing three boys. He denied the charges at his sentencing hearing, saying he would never harm the children he loved. Thirty foster children have lived in his home in Columbus Ohio.

Reference: Foster Parent Sentenced For Sexual Abuse

The other foster parenting article brought to my attention today by Google news alerts is about a 58-year-old Vermont man who is in jail, charged with sexually assaulting a 13-year-old girl living in his foster home.

Reference: Foster Parent Charged With Sexual Assault

Last week I was getting news alerts about a similar case in Florida. Next week it will be something else.

It takes no great wisdom to realize that the foster parenting system is a perfect opportunity for sexual predators to get solitary, unsupervised access to the children of others. And while many will say that the answer is to find better fosterers, or to screen them better, I have another solution: If child welfare caseworkers would stop detaining children on marginal neglect charges there would be fewer foster children out there being abused by strangers, with their parents not allowed to be nearby to protect them.

It was about six years ago that I received an email that I remember to this day. It was one of those things I’ll never forget. An Ohio mother who could barely write decent English wrote a long message to tell me that her 10-year-old daughter was being sexually abused by boys placed in the same foster home she was in. I don’t want to get into the graphic details of what she told me, but to be clear, there was visible proof and the child told her mother during a visitation what had being going on. This little girl had been removed from her parents’ home because she had a tiny eraser-sized bruise on her arm that her parents couldn’t explain. They had no idea where she got this small injury. For that, caseworkers took the child away from the home and family she loved and forced her into a foster home where she was abused much more severely than anything she’d ever experienced before.

A few years ago there was a Frontline two-part series about the death of a child in foster care, Logan Marrs. One part of the program featured a former foster child, Rose Garland. Her statement is worth paying attention to: “OK. Now, I know that there are good foster families out there, OK? But I also know that every foster kid that I have ever talked to, including myself, have been abused in foster homes. And I’m talking physically, emotionally and sexually. That may not be the case for every child, but it was the case for me.”

Reference: Failure to Protect - The Caseworker Files

Please, if you are a mandated reporter, an angry neighbor, a non-custodial parent, or any other type of person who might want to make a child abuse or neglect report, consider this. Is the child being abused so severely that risking fosterer abuse would be better? If not, let it go. I suggest being a friend and a neighbor, and helping the family directly instead of calling child welfare. Even if you hate the parents, do the right thing for the children involved.

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Some might think a couple who adopted eleven children out of foster care were philanthropists, but when you realize they got adoption subsidy payments of $4256 per month, it is hard to see mere kindness as a motive. And with so many children, a Norwalk, Ohio couple apparently didn’t know what to do, like the old lady in the shoe. So they kept some of the kids in cages made of wire and wood.

Last March a judge decided to terminate their rights to all eleven children, ages 2 to 15, after he determined that at least eight of them had been abused in the Gravelle home.

According to an Associated Press article dated February 15, 2007, Michael Gravelle said, “What do you do with these kids?” He said he prayed for an answer and built cages at the suggestion of social workers. His wife, Susan Gravelle, said the children were never confined as punishment. She claimed the cages were there to protect them. She said one of the children wanted to jump from a second-story window.

Two of the eleven children wrote statements that were read in court. A boy wrote about how grateful he was for his new fosterers. “Because of them I don’t have to steal food,” he said. “I can use the bathroom whenever I want. Never again will I have to sleep in a box.”

A girl’s statement read, “Mom, you walked around like you were God, then whenever you did go places you were Mother Teresa taking in the poor black kids that no one wanted.” She also said that the Gravelles “are grown adults who know the difference between right and wrong. So I ask that they get as much time in jail for as long as my siblings had to be in cages.”

A social worker and others testifying for the Gravelles said the children’s behavior improved because of the cages, which were painted bright red and blue, but the sheriff said the cages were urine stained and lacked pillows and mattresses. One boy claimed to have lived confined to a bathroom for 81 days, and an expert for the defense claimed this imprisonment helped the child.

In any case, the decision has been made. The Gravelles have sentenced to two years in prison because they adopted so many “special needs” children, that even with $4256 in adoption subsidy payments every month, they didn’t know what to do. Michael Gravelle said when they got into foster-adopting they felt “led by the Lord”. Perhaps if they hadn’t adopted so many kids, it wouldn’t have led to this.

References:
Judge denies pair custody of caged kids
Huron County duo’s lawyer calls decision ‘harsh,’ will appeal
Couple gets 2 years in ‘caged kids’ case
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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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