Bittersweet Justice: Washington

Occasionally there is justice for those negatively affected by the child welfare and adoption systems. Unfortunately, it is usually bittersweet and much too late. This will serve as REFORM Talk’s justice files.

From Longview, Washington, a foster family has been awarded $470,000 to settle a sexual assault suit. One of the worst issues with the foster care system nationwide is the lack of the State sharing child history information. This highlights the worst case scenario.

“The family, who regularly served as foster parents, filed a lawsuit in 2009 arguing that state social workers and others withheld key facts about the boy’s history, including that his mother was a prostitute and that the boy himself may have been subjected to severe sexual abuse. The family said that if they had known more about the boy’s background they never would have allowed him to live in their home with their own children.”

Their 9-year-old daughter was sexually assaulted by this boy.

“The boy, who was 16 at the time of the attacks, was convicted of assaulting the girl. Juvenile court files are sealed, and the Cowlitz County Prosecutor’s Office did not respond to requests for information about the boy’s punishment.

The boy admitted during a polygraph test to molesting the girl on 30 different occasions beginning in the spring of 2006. He also admitted during the polygraph test to having previously sexually abused another foster child, a boy, in another foster home, court documents said.”

“Last month, attorneys for the state of Washington agreed to pay Lonni and her husband a lump sum of $255,574. The state also will pay $216,600 to Lonni’s daughter, the victim, in scheduled payments through 2037. Lonni said CPS has stopped referring foster children to her home.”

“Lonni and Crandall, the family’s lawyer, said this week that state social workers essentially placed a ticking time bomb in Lonni’s home. They said victims of sexual abuse are hard to place in foster homes because they require intense psychological treatment and are themselves likely to prey sexually on other children.

In this case, they believe social workers didn’t disclose the boy’s troubling history because they were desperate to get him into a new foster home and rightly feared that Lonni would turn them down if she knew all of the facts.

Lonni, who runs a travel agency out of her home and has five children of her own, said she has parented dozens of foster kids. She said in court documents that she was contacted by CPS officials in early January of 2005 about a boy who was living with his aunt but was having trouble adjusting to a strict household. Lonni asked four people, including CPS officials and the boy’s aunt, whether the boy, who was 14 at the time, “had any physical violence problems or sexual aggression issues.” Each time she was told that there were no major problems, she said.”

“The question mattered, Lonni said in court documents, because she has “never hesitated to have foster children removed from our home when I felt they endangered my children.” In one case, she said, she had a boy taken from her house after he “acted out sexually with our youngest son.” Another had to go after he “kicked our daughter over losing a video game.” Lonni even had CPS workers come and get a 15-year-old girl who “smoked and used a lot of makeup.”

“I felt she was a bad influence on my daughters, who were about the same age,” she said.

After an arranged meeting at a Castle Rock sandwich shop, Lonni and her family agreed to take in the boy who would go on to sexually abuse her daughter. She said she was only told the boy had Attention Deficit Disorder, was defiant and had been caught stealing from a school vending machine.

In reality, though, CPS had a long, documented record suggesting the boy had been sexually abused.”

“CPS had been tipped off over the years that the boy’s mother was a prostitute who had taken her son with her while meeting customers, court documents said. One of the boy’s foster parents had previously wondered whether he had been sexually abused, according to a Children’s Services case log.

The boy was twice suspended from his school in Onalaska in 2003 for sexual harassment of a student.

It was reported to CPS a year later that the 13-year-old boy was watching TV in a room where his mother was passed out on the couch wearing only a T-shirt. CPS workers said the boy also was seen watching pornographic material on a home computer.

Records also showed that the boy’s mother had been accused of sexually abusing her daughter, the boy’s sister, but was convicted of communicating with a minor for immoral purposes in a plea bargain.

Linda Meadows, a CPS official who investigated the situation following the abuse in Lonni’s home, reported that there had previously been 15 referrals to children’s services for reports of abuse of the boy at the hands of his mother, according to the court documents.”

“”I found that there were allegations that his mother was abusing drugs and prostituting herself, physically and emotionally abusing (the boy), exposing (him) to adult sexuality and domestic violence,” Meadows said during a court deposition.

The aunt told the investigator that “she never trusted (the boy) with her own daughters and that she had an alarm on his door,” court documents said. In addition, according to the documents, the boy’s aunt told Meadows she believed her nephew was “a sexual predator” and “she didn’t feel like her daughters were safe” with him in the house.

Meadows, who worked as a DSHS social worker from 1987 to 2008, also said it was “poor judgment not to disclose more information about (the boy’s) past” to Lonni, adding, “perhaps if she had more detail about his past, then she would have either not taken him or watched him more closely.”

Perhaps? Ya think?

[The Daily News 5/5/11 by Tony Lystra]