State Seizes Child Because Parents Smoked Pot, Child Dies in Foster Care

[roo_ster]

http://reason.com/blog/2013/08/02/state-seizes-two-year-old-child-from-par#comment

http://www.kvue.com/news/Father-of-murdered-foster-child-speaks-to-KVUE-218037541.html

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/crime/two-year-old-dies-in-foster-care

   

• n Monday night, [Joshua] Hill’s daughter Alexandria, or Alex as they liked to call her, was rushed to a Rockdale hospital with severe head injuries, then flown to Scott and White Children’s Emergency Hospital in Temple and immediately placed on life support.

    Alex was living with foster parents after DFPS removed her from her parent's home last November for "neglectful supervision."

    Hill admits they were smoking pot when their daughter was asleep.

    “We never hurt our daughter. She was never sick, she was never in the hospital, and she never had any issues until she went into state care.”

Alex spent time at two foster homes. Her parents noticed bruises on her body and mold in her bag when they saw her while she was at the first home. Her father says he told Child Protective Services they’d have to put him in jail because he didn’t want to return her to the foster home, and in January she was placed in a second home. Alex is now dead, and the foster mother was arrested after her description of what happened to Alex didn’t match the injuries Alex sustained. The mother admitted to slamming the two-year-old girl’s head and is charged with murder.

Statistics on child abuse in foster care are, perhaps unsurprisingly, hard to come by, but children in foster care may be up to 10 times more likely to die than children in the care of their own parents; one estimate places the number of children who die in foster care in the US every year at about 1540.

Comments to the reason.com article:

wwhorton| 8.3.13 @ 9:30PM   |#

I can't think of a more horrifying example of state power than this.

H. Protagonist| 8.3.13 @ 1:57AM   |#

I just told my wife that if this happened to us, she'd better prepare for me to go all Carl Lee Haley.

Here is the strongest statement in support of CPS's actions:

According to court records, Alexandria's mother had a medical condition that does not allow for the child to be left alone with her. The TDFPS also received allegations that Hill used marijuana on a regular basis and on one occasion Hill almost dropped Alexandria while going down the stairs of the home as he was trying to hand the child to his sister.

Wondering:
Were my wife similarly disabled, would I be forbidden from drinking any alcohol while my children were asleep?  FTR: nearly dropping my infant son on slippery steps in the rain at church, whilst wearing western boots, caused me to buy a nice pair of Redwing roper pull-ons.  They look good enough with a polish and have a non-slip sole.  We instituted a "no wearing heels/slippery footgear while holding babies" policy.  Afterward the aforementioned incident in which there were also witnesses who could testify, "on one occasion Hill jfruser almost dropped Alexandria his son while going down the stairs of the home church."

During the month of November, Alexandria was being cared for by her paternal grandmother before the State intervened on Nov. 26.

Yep, we might wish that some folk never breed, but that is out of our hands.  I am not OK with giving the state this sort of power.  As in many cases, the state causes more misery by intervention than would otherwise have occurred.  Better for the awful outcome at the hands of their parents than via state intervention:
1. Fewer false accusations resulting in children being kidnapped by the state.
2. No diffused "We was just doing our jobs and we work hard as caseworkers!" responsibility.  The parents abuse & kill their child, the parents face the consequences.
3. Fewer expended taxpayer dollars.
4. My tax dollars don;t support a system of banal abuse of children.

[AZRedhawk44]

2. No diffused "We was just doing our jobs and we work hard as caseworkers!" responsibility.  The parents abuse & kill their child, the parents face the consequences.

^^ This, above all else.

[BlueStarLizzard]

I wouldn't jump to blame the caseworkers.

Their hands are tied by the laws. The fact is they can't always exercise their own judgement on a case to case basis and the law doesn't have the flexiblity to deal with a lot of cases.
In some ways, it's good the caseworkers can't exercise judgement, because, in all honesty, a lot of them suck at their jobs. In other ways, it sucks, because when the law outright states that somethings cannot be tolerated, the caseworker must remove the child, regardless of their opinion based on actually seeing the situation.

Secondly, foster parents are as much a hit or miss as the caseworkers. Some are good, some really give a *expletive deleted*it and others just want the checks every month. Again, the options are limited in terms of how well they are screened and monitered.

The fact is the system doesn't have the resources to support what it is expected to deal with. I'd "whine" too if I was expected to function 100% perfect within a broken system.

[AZRedhawk44]

BSL, I know this system very well.  I used to work for Pierce County Alliance up in Tacoma, WA, as a case worker, while in college.  I was still fairly lefty/granola at that time, and it was still a little bit before my sudden conversion to the pro-gun camp by means of mountain lion and bear encounters, or when I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time.

PCA is a non-profit non-governmental agency that takes the worst kids from CPS.  The ones daddy touched inappropriately and brainwashed into thinking that was just normal, the ones that got beaten nearly to death, the ones that were left starving and got down to 40 pounds and were 10 years old, things like that.

I had foster parents I was compelled to work with due to insufficient other options.

I had some I found were abusing one of my charges.  They were put in jail for a few years and are now felons and cannot foster anymore.

I had some that couldn't manage their finances worth a damn and did the foster thing purely for the extra $500/month it generated for them.  And treated the kids (because two were worth $1000, and three were $1500, dontchyaknow) like cattle rather than children.

And I had families that were truly wonderful.

I'm glad I never worked for the State and had to do the actual child seizures or court representation to defend the seizure, and I got to focus more on the rehabilitation instead. 

But even so, I could only work there for a little under 2 years before it put a hole in my respect for humanity.


However, anyone that does a harm to a child in this world after accepting responsibility for his or her well-being, ought to be held culpable.  Including agents of the State.  Abusive foster parents, blind ninny case workers who don't perceive ongoing abuse, managers who oversee multiple clueless case workers who fail to intervene in abusive environments... all of them.  I don't believe in any free passes for any of them.

[Strings]

I sometimes wonder if the law's view isn't to put children in the most dangerous position possible.

I've seen kids seized for absolutely nothing. And kids that were clearly in danger left "to protect the sanctity of the family"