Bittersweet Justice:Alaska-TJ White case
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.
“An Alaskan abuse victim who was beaten with a shovel and left to sleep outside by his adoptive parents more than a decade ago has won a $1 million settlement from state social services.
T.J White, 20, was awarded the sum on Friday following Alaska’s Office of Child Services decision to place him with Anchorage couple Patrick and Sherry Kelley in 2001 – despite repeated complaints from his immediate family about abuse.
The Kelley’s were jailed in 2004 for 17 months for the treatment they dished out to T.J over three years, which included breaking his arm and keeping him outside for so long he had to endure maggots infesting open wounds.
Baptized Christian by his cocaine addicted mother, he was re-named Brandon by the Kelley’s and now is on his third name, Thomas Joseph White.
He was taken away from his drug-addicted mother in July 1999 after authorities received 26 reports he was at risk of being hurt because of her and her partner’s drug problem.
He then went to live with his great aunt and in July 2000, it was decided that he should go and join his other step-brother and sisters who had been placed with Patrick and Sherry Kelley at their home in Anchorage.
They had excellent references and state services said that they were doing such an excellent job with T.J’s three siblings that it made sense to place him there.
At first, T.J remembers a happy life playing basketball on the streets with his two stepsisters, one step-brother and neighbors.
Then, suddenly, the Kelley’s told the children in their care that they could no longer play outside. All the furniture was removed from their bedrooms. Locks were placed on the outside of their bedroom doors.
Speaking to The Anchorage Daily News, T.J said that he was confused by what his new carers were doing.
‘Us kids thought it was our fault,’ said T.J, who has grown to stand 6’9″ since being taken away from the Kelley’s in 2004.
His aunt, Betsy Golan noticed the change in demeanor in her nephew when she flew from her home in Fort Lauderdale to visit in May 2001 for an unannounced visit.
‘All the kids ran to the door,’ she said to the Anchorage Daily News.
Golan recalled how the Kelley’s refused to invite her in and tried to get them to meet at a local McDonald’s instead.
Insisting on seeing how the children lived, Golan said that when she and her police officer husband entered the house they saw the locks and a bucket in the corner of the children’s rooms, which acted as a toilet.
‘It wasn’t like a little boy’s room with toys and shoes and magazines or comics,’ Golan said in a recent interview.
‘It was like somewhere very very very frightening
Golan and her husband contacted Alaska’s Division of Family and Youth Services but according to her, no one even came out to hear or take an account of their troubling story or returned their phone calls afterwards.
Despite the large settlement, state officials have refused to take responsibility for the abuse suffered by T.J and say they have no record of the complaints. The aunt should have called police if she was so concerned they have said.
However, the worst was still to come.
After May, 2001, the Kelley’s moved to a remote compound near Big Lake in Alaska and put the children to work on the land.
They pulled them out of school and began to systematically beat T.J. and his siblings.
‘No matter what we said, we were just constantly getting beat,’ he said.
‘At first it started out with belts and switches and hands and whatnot. When we moved out to Big Lake, it was logs, metal pipes, shovels, anything they could get their hands on.’
T.J has said that Sherry Kelley was the worst and despaired to The Anchorage Daily News that the worst part was her parent’s were their neighbors and didn’t act to protect the children.
They were banished outside in Alaska’s freezing temperatures and slept huddled up where they could in tarps and under broken-down vans on the property.
The children were given kerosene lanterns in winter for heat and one evening T.J awoke to find himself on fire after falling asleep next to one outside.
Patrick Kelley threw snow on him to put the blaze out
Even though he suffered third-degree burns across most of his body, he was never taken to the hospital and the Kelley’s kept his wounds clean by rubbing alcohol on them – causing T.J. excruciating pain.
In one horrific account, T.J. said that one night as his burns were healing he felt something moving on his legs and looked down.
Maggots had begun to live and infest his wounds and the Kelley’s used a bristle brush to get them out.
One winter day following that, he was moving wood around the property and the glove he was wearing on his right hand had a hole over the finger.
‘It just got colder and colder,’ T.J. said. He lost his finger tip to frost-bite afterwards.
In another violent incident, Sherry struck him in the face with a shovel and knocked out a tooth and T.J said he would only be fed if he worked so hard he wanted to pass out through exhaustion.
At last, Sherry’s parents phoned the police in July 2004.
She panicked and tried to escape with T.J. and his youngest sibling – all the while hitting T.J. with a metal pipe in the car.
His arm broke and swelled to twice the normal size.
They ended up in a Walmart, where Sherry bought T.J. some gummy worms, but became so annoyed he couldn’t open the bag she grabbed them off him and threw them out the window.
Eventually they returned to the Big Lake compound where state troopers arrested the Kelley’s.
T.J. spent the next three weeks in the hospital, undergoing skin grafts and treatment for malnourishment.
‘I got food and a bed and a TV, people to see and talk to,’ he said.
Patrick and Sherry Kelley ended up facing between them faced 92 counts of abuse, neglect, kidnapping and child endangerment for their treatment of the children.
The charges were changed in a plea deal to felony assault and criminal nonsupport against Sherry and felony child endangerment against Patrick.
They each served 17 months.
Grandfather, George Long and his wife, Shirley, the children’s grandmother, were charged with mistreating the children as well.
T.J. is adamant that although he understands that the state believed the Kelley’s were good parents on paper, they should have followed up with visits and listened to the complaints of his aunt.
‘They could have checked in on us at random times,’ T.J. said.
‘They could have looked in the background of all of us kids and seen that we looked like a troubled group.’
Christy Lawton, director of the Office of Children’s Services said that the state will admit no wrongdoing.
‘The only lesson to be learned was that OCS does not have a crystal ball that will perfectly predict the future,’ she said to The Anchorage Daily News.”
Frostbitten, beaten and left to rot while maggots infested his wounds: Abuse victim is awarded $1million after being subjected to a litany of horrors by his adoptive parents[Daily Mail 5/19/14 by James Nye]
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