How Could You? Hall of Shame-John Michael McGuigan/Gabriel Myers Case UPDATED-Child Death and lawsuit
This will be an archive of heinous actions by those involved in child welfare, foster care and adoption. We forewarn you that these are deeply disturbing stories that may involve sex abuse, murder, kidnapping and other horrendous actions.
From Miami, Florida,”prominent” foster father John Michael McGuigan appeared in court on Friday May 13 on allegations of molestation of a child in Massachussetts years ago. He has a 4-year-old adopted son and 3 other foster children in his care. One of the three foster children was under respite care. DCF has removed all children from his care.
“Friday’s court appearance marked the second occasion McGuigan has had a role in a high-profile investigation involving a Broward foster child. McGuigan, 52, had twice been the foster father for Gabriel Myers , a 7-year-old boy who, while living with another foster family, hanged himself with a retractable shower cord two years ago.”
“McGuigan has not been charged by police with any crime. He is a vice president of Broward House, an HIV/AIDS community service group.”
“Source told The Miami Herald the investigation began after a man who used to live in Massachusetts, McGuigan’s home state, told authorities that McGuigan had molested him when he was a child. The sources said authorities interviewed a witness who corroborated the allegations.
McGuigan’s name first surfaced in 2009, when Gabriel Myers, who told authorities he had been fondled by an older boy while he lived with grandparents in Ohio, hanged himself from a shower cord in a bathroom of the Margate foster home where child welfare workers had placed him. Before going to the home, Gabriel had lived twice with McGuigan.”
“McGuigan had custody of Gabriel in the spring of 2009 when the boy’s disruptive behavior began to escalate dramatically. McGuigan asked foster care administrators to remove the boy from his home in March 2009 after Gabriel threatened to harm both McGuigan and the toddler foster child in his care. McGuigan later adopted the toddler.”
Foster dad faces molestation probe
[The Miami Herald 5/13/11 by Carol Marbin Miller]
Update: ” Sex-abuse investigation by police and state child welfare administrators involving a former Broward foster father has widened after an 8-year-old boy who lived with the man told authorities that he had been molested.
The boy’s allegations against former foster father Michael McGuigan came about eight months after an adult man reported to the Margate Police Department that McGuigan had molested him when he was a child near Boston. Following the most recent disclosure, administrators with the Department of Children & Families removed a separate child, an adopted son, from McGuigan’s home. That youngster originally had been placed in the home as a foster child. ”
Details of the investigation emerged Friday as Broward Circuit Judge Kenneth Gillespie, who presides over child-welfare matters, held a routine hearing involving two brothers who had been placed in foster care and then reunited with their parents. Neither the children nor their parents are being named by The Miami Herald to protect the family’s privacy.
At Friday’s hearing, Gillespie asked whether the 8-year-old was receiving counseling to deal with the abuse he reportedly suffered. A caseworker for Broward’s privately run child welfare group, ChildNet, said the boy is seeing a therapist. Gillespie instructed child welfare administrators to ensure that no children in state custody be placed in McGuigan’s home.
“I hate to say this, but no more children can be placed there until this investigation is complete,”
Gillespie told Ann Keough, an assistant attorney general who represented the state at Friday’s hearing.
“I know these are allegations; I understand that,” the judge added. “But until this investigation is complete, none of my children are to be placed there.”
Addressing the boys’ mother, the judge added: “I’m sorry that these allegations are arising. We are investigating them.”
A child-welfare spokesman said no children from state care have been in McGuigan’s home since last spring.
“Following the allegations last year, we immediately removed all foster children from the home, and Mr. McGuigan voluntarily relinquished his foster-care license,” said Mark Riordan, a spokesman in Broward for the Department of Children & Families.
Neither McGuigan, who is a vice president at the Broward House HIV/AIDS service group, nor his attorney, Larry Davis, responded to calls from a Miami Herald reporter. McGuigan was not present for the hearing.
McGuigan first came to the attention of child protection administrators in 2009, when he was the foster father for 7-year-old Gabriel Myers — whose death remains one of the most shocking in Florida history.
Gabriel, who told authorities he had been fondled by an older boy when he lived with grandparents in Ohio, had been taken into DCF custody in June 2008 when his mother, Candace Myers, was found passed out in her car in the parking lot of a restaurant, surrounded by tranquilizers and other narcotics.
McGuigan had custody of Gabriel in the spring of 2009, when the boy’s behavior became difficult.
At that time, McGuigan asked child welfare administrators to remove Gabriel from his home, saying Gabriel had threatened to harm both him and a toddler foster child in his home — the boy McGuigan later adopted.
Gabriel later hanged himself with a shower cord in the bathroom of another foster family. He had been prescribed a cocktail of powerful psychiatric drugs, some of which have been linked to a higher risk of suicide among children, and his death sparked a year-long DCF investigation into the use of such drugs among foster children.
Last May, child-welfare chiefs removed both the adoptive son and three foster children from McGuigan’s home after an adult man who used to live in Massachusetts, McGuigan’s home state, told authorities that McGuigan had molested him when he was a child. Sources told The Herald at the time that the man’s story had been corroborated by a witness.
Later last year, the adoptive son was returned to McGuigan after a Broward judge ruled that the state had offered insufficient evidence to warrant the termination of McGuigan’s rights to the boy. The child was removed again this year, though, following the new allegations. A judge has yet to decide whether the boy should be returned to McGuigan or remain in state care. 
At the hearing Friday, Keough told the judge that the new report was being investigated by police. A spokesman for the Margate Police Department, which has been handling the case, could not be reached Friday. ”
Sex-abuse allegations swirl around foster dad
[The Miami Herald 2/10/12 by Carol Marbin Miller]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update 2:“The suicide of 7-year-old Gabriel Myers in foster care shocked the child-welfare system in 2009. It led to a series of recommendations about Florida’s use of psychotropic medications on foster kids and how to protect already-traumatized children from sexual abuse by other abused children.But nearly five years after Gabriel hung himself in the shower of his foster home in Margate, the findings that followed his death are mostly unfulfilled.Children’s advocates haven’t given up, though, and will try to move several measures forward during the 2014 legislative session.
In 2008, when he was 6 years old, Gabriel was found in a car with his mother, who was passed out with drugs at her side, authorities said. He was placed in foster care. Documentation in his case files showed that, while living in Ohio before moving to Florida, he had been sexually abused by an older child and shown pornography by an adult relative. Gabriel exhibited sexual behavior problems at school and had lost one foster placement due to his troubling behavior.
“One of the major things we learned was that the reason he was so disturbed was that he had been sexually abused himself,” said attorney Howard Talenfeld, president of the advocacy group Florida’s Children First. “As a victim of sexual abuse, he was acting out. This was a significant part of his problem that went unaddressed.”
Gabriel was also taking two psychotropic medications when he died, and a Department of Children and Families investigation found that neither his parents nor a judge had approved them, nor was the medication he took reflected in his case files.
Then-DCF Secretary George Sheldon appointed two work groups in 2009 and 2010 to study and make recommendations about the use of psychotropic medications on foster children and about child-on-child sexual abuse.
One of the groups learned that in 2009, about 5 percent of all U.S. children were treated with psychotropic medications, but in Florida’s foster care system, 15.2 percent of children received at least one such medication. Of these, more than 16 percent were being medicated without the consent of a parent, guardian or judge.
Five years out, the verdict is that more progress has been made on the psychotropic medication issue than on the issue of child-on-child sexual abuse.
“I think we’re a lot better. I think we’re a lot better than most states,” said Robin Rosenberg, deputy director of Florida’s Children First, who served on the workgroup on psychotropic medications. “But I think more can be done on alternatives (to medication) and on really making sure that parents give informed consent and that courts have a true understanding of what it means.”
Talenfeld charges that while extensive recommendations were offered to address both psychotropic medications and child-on-child sex abuse, they were dropped in January 2011, when Gov. Rick Scott took office and tapped David Wilkins as the new secretary.
“This report was abandoned, and nothing was done to implement any of the recommendations,” Talenfeld said. “And they were very, very significant.”
In July, when Esther Jacobo became DCF’s interim secretary, Florida’s Children First contacted her and, Talenfeld said, began drafting legislation addressing key recommendations, such as mandatory reporting to the abuse hotline of the sexual abuse of children in state care and a tracking, placement and quality assurance system.
The group is also pushing to eliminate the age distinction for children who act out sexually in the foster care system. Currently, those 13 and over are reported to the sheriff’s office as sex offenders. Talenfeld —- who also hopes lawmakers will pass a claims bill for a client of his who was sexually abused by a foster child — says all child victims should be treated for the abuse they’ve endured, even if the symptoms involve acting out.
Another key recommendation was that the Legislature should provide funding to ensure that each child in the care of the state is assigned a guardian ad litem — an advocate for abused and neglected children in the court system.
“Nothing will get better unless the Legislature fully funds guardians ad litem for every trial,” said Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Cindy Lederman. “We are still far behind in that most important recommendation.”
By the terms of both state and federal law, the program should be fully funded, said Alan Abramowitz, executive director of Florida Guardian ad Litem. Currently, there are 29,285 children under court supervision statewide, of whom 76 percent have a guardian ad litem.
This year, Scott recommended an increase that would extend coverage to all children in out-of-home care and 77 percent of those under court supervision. Senate President Don Gaetz and House Speaker Will Weatherford, in a work plan for the session, said they hoped to fully fund the program over the next several years.
Abramowitz said the guardian ad litem program will need about $6.1 million in Fiscal Year 2014-15 and additional funds in the following three years to achieve 100 percent representation of all dependent children.
He also said the program “has made psychotropic medication a priority. Our standards require our program to prioritize children on psychotropic medication.”
As to how DCF is handling the psychotropic medication issue five years after Gabriel’s death, Rosenberg said “the state put a pretty good system in place, as far as creating a rule to be followed and attempting to ascertain whether at least a legal authority is there.”
But as a foster parent, she said, she’s also seen the other end of the process.
“I think we still kind of default to ‘If a doctor prescribed it, then it must be what the kid needs’ — and not enough questions about what information was provided, what did the doctor look at and what else has been tried? …I’m not convinced that everyone on the front line has an in-depth understanding to the extent that they need in order to get good decisions made for each child,” Rosenberg said.”
[CBS Miami 2/7/14]
Update 3:“A foster child has filed a lawsuit against his foster parent and child welfare providers, Kids in Distress Inc., and ChildNet, Inc., alleging that he was sexually abused by his foster parent and that the private child welfare agencies did not conduct the proper background checks prior to the fostering.
The child, only identified as R.S., said his foster father, John Michael McGuigan, who had a history of child molestation, sexually abused him.
According to Howard Talenfeld, the Fort Lauderdale child abuse attorney representing R.S, at the age of 49 and unmarried, McGuigan requested to receive a foster care license in May 2008, but incomplete background checks weren’t performed.
McGuigan has been arrested on charges of cocaine possession and investigated for lewd and lascivious acts after a minor male reported that McGuigan had shown him pornographic pictures of a child and asked him to perform sex acts.
“Required, common-sense precautions that would have protected this child from this accused child molester weren’t taken,” Talenfeld said. “Mandatory requests to local law enforcement agencies would have revealed Mr. McGuigan was a threat to children he came in contact with. It’s not comprehensible that Kids In Distress would place this boy and other children in Mr. McGuigan’s care. This is another example of the state’s failed experiment in child protection privatization.”
Among foster children McGuigan has had in his care was a 7-year-old Margate boy, Gabriel Myers. Myers hung himself in the home of another foster family in 2009.
“Gabriel’s deteriorating condition and McGuigan’s parenting were ‘red flags’ that should have alerted Kids In Distress and ChildNet that there was something wrong in the home,” Talenfeld said.
Myers’ death prompted an investigation that ended in recommendation of systematic improvements in Florida’s foster care system.
According to Talenfeld, after a report that was made through the Florida Abuse Hotline that a former foster child of McGuigan’s was sexually abused, R.S. was removed from the home.
A subsequent report received by the Department of Children and Families through the hotline disclosed allegations that R.S. had also been sexually abused by McGuigan.
The lawsuit alleges negligence by Kids In Distress, Inc. and ChildNet, Inc., for failing to ensure the health, safety and well-being of all children in the state who are cared for by family foster homes in Broward County, as well as battery and intentional infliction of emotional distress by McGuigan.”
Child sues foster parent, welfare provider over alleged sexual abuse[Local 10 5/5/15 by Dawn Brooks]
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