How Could You? Hall of Shame-George and Nancie Barnes and Lawsuit UPDATED
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 Watertown,Connecticut, adoptive parents, George and Nancie Barnes, both 47, “are charged with abusing their five adopted children were licensed as an adoptive couple by the Department of Children and Families, and had passed criminal and child-welfare background checks before adopting the children from the department.
“We have high expectations for the families who foster and adopt children from state care, and those expectations are met in all but the rarest of instances,” DCF Commissioner Joette Katz said in a statement Friday morning.
“If the allegations are true, the treatment of the children is completely unacceptable and a violation of the trust we place in foster and adoptive families,” Katz said.
George Barnes, 47, a licensed medical first-responder and a volunteer firefighter, and his wife, Nancie Barnes, 47, were arraigned Friday morning in Superior Court in Waterbury.
In his warrant affidavit, Police Officer David McDonnell quotes the couple’s 15-year-old adopted daughter as describing extensive periods of isolation in the bathroom, including during Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Transgressions such as taking things from siblings or trying to call her biological mother would result in her banishment to the bathroom, where she had to read, while standing up and under constant video surveillance, pages and pages of material that the parents printed off the Internet.
The 15-year-old and the couple’s 9-year-old adopted son appeared to have suffered the brunt of the punishment.
In interviews with police, Nancie and George Barnes said they used the bathroom as a “timeout” room, and chose that location because the house was too small to devote any other room to the punishment. Nancie Barnes told police that she knew, from an outsider’s perspective, that exiling the children to the bathroom “looks terrible and that she wishes she had another bedroom to help out.”
Police said they began investigating George and Nancie Barnes after one of the children complained of the abuse at school.
The children, who range in age from 9 to 18, are back in the care of DCF. At the arraignment Friday, a judge issued protective orders for the four minor children, which prohibit the parents from contacting the children. The 18-year-old requested a no-contact order on his or her own behalf. The parents are free after each posted a $35,000 bond.
Police said the children went to school and did not have to sleep in the bathroom. The children were wards of the state when the couple adopted them.
Records show George Barnes was a parts manager for a Waterbury-area welding company. Nancie Barnes is a principal in a bookkeeping firm in Watertown, according to business records.
Police discovered that one of the children had been frequently ordered to remain in the bathroom as punishment from September through Dec. 15, when authorities stepped in and removed the children from the home. The children were placed back with DCF, police said.
“The children were removed from the home when we received information about this treatment a number of weeks ago, and they are receiving services to help them heal from their experiences,” Katz said.
She said the parents were licensed by DCF “and accordingly received criminal and child welfare background checks prior to obtaining their license and caring for the children.”
DCF spokesman Gary Kleeblatt said the department would not be providing specifics about the couple’s adoptions.
The parents were charged with two counts of cruelty to persons, second-degree unlawful restraint and risk of injury to a minor.
Police said more charges are expected against the couple.”
Five Children In Watertown Abuse Case Were Adopted From DCF [ Hartford Courant 1/29/16 by Josh Kovner and David Moran]
REFORM Puzzle Piece
Update: “A couple who was arrested in January for allegedly locking their adopted children in the bathroom for long periods of time as punishment has been arrested again.
On Tuesday, police arrested Nancie and George Barnes, charging them with additional counts of risk of injury to a minor, unlawful restraint and cruelty to persons for their treatment of their other three children. The first arrest was only regarding two of the five kids, who range in age from 9 to 18.
The couple is said to have disciplined their children by locking them in the bathroom, sometimes for months at a time, and requiring them to stand and read for hours. The children were only allowed out for school and to sleep, and were given food while in the bathroom.
Besides the original charges extending to the other children, George was charged with third-degree assault and Nancie was charged with disorderly conduct after an incident in which the oldest of the five children was grabbed by the throat and pinned to the couch by George while Nancie pushed him.
The specific new charges are:
- George: two counts of cruelty to persons, two counts of risk of injury to a minor, two counts of unlawful restraint in the second degree and one count of assault in the third degree
- Nancie: two counts of cruelty to persons, two counts of risk of injury to a minor, two counts of unlawful restraint in the second degree and one count of disorderly conduct.
The previous charges from January included two counts of cruelty to persons, unlawful restraint in the second degree and risk of injury to a minor each.
Both were released on $10,000 bond and will appear in court on Wednesday.
The children remain in the custody of the Department of Children and Families.
State officials say that George and Nancie had passed background checks before they were cleared by state child welfare officials to adopt the five kids. After the first arrest in January, DCF released this statement:
The parents who were arrested today were licensed by the Department and accordingly received criminal and child welfare background checks prior to obtaining their license and caring for the children. We have high expectations for the families who foster and adopt children from state care, and those expectations are met in in all but the rarest of instances. If the allegations are true, the treatment of the children is completely unacceptable and a violation of the trust we place in foster and adoptive families. The children were removed from the home when we received information about this treatment a number of weeks ago, and they are receiving services to help them heal from their experiences”
http://fox61.com/2016/02/23/watertown-couple-arrested-again-for-locking-adopted-kids-in-bathroom-as-discipline/
[Fox 61 2/23/16 by Samantha Schoenfeld]
“Several employees of the Department of Children and Families in the Willimantic regional office have been suspended after allowing two children to remain with a husband and wife who are on the sex-offender and child-abuse registries, respectively.
Despite receiving a complaint on DCF’s child-abuse hotline last spring from someone concerned about the safety of the children, and then learning about the couple’s background, caseworkers never removed the children. Four months went by before the director of the regional DCF office learned of the situation and had the two children — a 1-year-old and an infant — taken out of the home, the agency said. They were not harmed.
It is another in a series of troubling cases that have spawned withering criticism of DCF Commissioner Joette Katz in some quarters in recent months.
The most recent cases include the overdose death of a toddler in Plymouth in June that followed a string of child-protection complaints against a mother who struggled with drugs and mental illness; a Watertown adoptive couple arrested in January for abusing at least two of their children; and an aunt in Groton, approved to care for her nephew by DCF, who was arrested Feb. 4 after the child was found to be emaciated, with broken bones in his arm and burn marks. The aunt suffered from COPD and had a teenager with special needs. Her husband had a brain tumor and also needed care.
The Willimantic case, though it did not result in injury to the children, stands out because of the disciplinary action that has been taken. Some or all of the suspensions could become terminations when DCF concludes its internal investigation. DCF is also reviewing its own work in the other cases.
DCF, under Katz, has also drawn praise in Connecticut and nationally for reducing by more than 60 percent the number of children in institutional care, and doubling to 40 percent the placements of children with relatives, which is recognized as a way to limit trauma.
But even without the headline-grabbing tragedies, continuing serious problems with DCF have been pointed out by a federal monitor, including that the department consistently fails to meet all the needs of children in its care and struggles with high caseloads, which hurt the ability of front-line social workers to adequately monitor troubled households.
But the death in Plymouth of 2-year-old Londyn Raine Sack, and the Groton abuse case, as well as the November 2011 child-abuse death of 3-year-old Athena Angeles that is now part of a multimillion-dollar wrongful death claim against the state, have led to searing criticism of Katz by state Sen. Len Fasano, R-North Haven, the minority leader of the legislature.
Fasano, in public hearings, has lashed out at Katz for policies that place some cases on a low-risk track, which limits DCF’s continued oversight of a case. Fasano has also been deeply critical of Katz’s emphasis on greatly increasing the number of foster children placed with relatives, as opposed to traditional “stranger” foster families, saying in essence that Katz is pursuing these placements merely to swell the percentages. And he has said that Katz is not sufficiently accountable to the public.
“Kids’ lives depend on your decisions and I have put here a time frame since I’ve gotten involved in this matter, of all the kids that I would argue were killed — homicides that should not have happened but for the way we run DCF,” Fasano said of Katz in testimony Tuesday before the legislature’s children’s committee.
Katz, at that point, was sitting in the gallery, and said later that she was furious over what she called patently unfair and erroneous statements by Fasano.
Outside the hearing room Tuesday, committee co-chair state Rep. Diana Urban, D-North Stonington, said she has great confidence in Katz, and co-chair state Sen. Dante Bartolomeo, D-Meriden, also has consistently endorsed Katz’s leadership of the agency. Katz was confirmed by a bipartisan vote of the legislature for a second term in January.
Katz, in an interview with The Courant Wednesday evening, adamantly defended DCF’s work, saying relative foster care, and steering low-risk households to family and mental-health services rather than taking the children are methods that have become national standards for progressive agencies.
She said despite the tragedies that made headlines, and what could have been a tragedy for the Willimantic office, maltreatment of children since her appointment by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy in 2011 has been found in only 0.2 percent of DCF foster families.
“We have had tragedies, there has been failure. Nothing is 100 percent,” Katz said. “But you don’t let that change your course when you know that course is the right one. Can we improve? Absolutely. But you don’t abandon the mission. When you have a mistake with a placement in relative care, you don’t say, ‘OK, no more children with relatives.’ ”
Katz acknowledged that serious mistakes and human errors have occurred. She said she was addressing them by reinforcing that safety of children is the first priority.
Katz admitted that there was a rumor in the department — she said it isn’t widespread — that she wanted her social workers to pursue relative placements at all costs. She said that was never the policy and the vast majority of DCF workers know that and pursue the placements only after determining the household is safe.
Katz also acknowledged that some of the major changes in the department, such as the dramatic reduction of children in institutional care, have put great pressure on employees to get the foster placements right, and to be as certain as possible that families on the low-risk track belong there and should remain there.
“Yes, it puts pressure on the agency,” said Katz. “This is very challenging work. The answer is, we do our jobs and we make sure the placements we make are appropriate. And I have told the staff from the day I started, ‘Do the work, make the assessments, touch all the bases, and I will have your back.’ ”
She said the case that ended in Londyn Sack’s death did not belong on the low-risk track, which, in DCF parlance, is called “family assessment response.”
“That was a mistake. It wasn’t a FAR case,” said Katz.
Londyn ingested prescription drugs that her mother, Rebekah Robinson, had left out. The mother has been charged with manslaughter and risk of injury to a minor.
Katz said in nearly 8 out of 10 cases in which there was a possibility a child would be removed from the home, DCF was able to hold what are called “considered-removal” meetings. After these sessions, which include many of the people involved in the children’s care, 70 percent of the kids were not removed. They went home and DCF continues to monitor the families.
Past DCF administrations have removed large numbers of children in a knee-jerk reaction to abuse deaths, flooding the foster-care system and perpetuating trauma for the children, Katz said.
She said of the children removed from their homes after the considered-removal meetings, 72 percent of them went to relatives. The vast majority of those placements are working out well, Katz said.
State Child Advocate Sarah Eagan has monitored DCF as closely as anyone in the state. Her office’s investigations have, among other findings, revealed an overuse of restraints and seclusion at the juvenile jail and serious omissions by DCF caseworkers in the Londyn Sack case.
Eagan said Thursday she agrees with Katz’s core philosophies about relative foster care and providing services rather than removing children when child safety is not an issue.
“The agenda is the right agenda,” said Eagan.
She said there is “life-and-death urgency” to the work and there is an issue as to whether quality-control measures at DCF “happen as robustly and as inclusively as they need to.”
Eagan said another key concern is whether the state has enough services to support the children who remain at home, or who are placed with relatives or traditional foster-care families.
“We are building that service array, but there are still significant gaps,” said Eagan. “This places a heavy burden on DCF’s supervision of front-line workers, on monitoring families, and on quality control.”
Eagan noted that the federal monitor, who tracks court-ordered performance measures, “has consistently warned that the child-protection work is undermined by insufficient staffing at DCF.”
Eagan said her office has reviewed several cases recently “where there was a concern about how a child was matched to a family, or how the child’s needs were being met in the family where he or she was placed.”
After DCF’s Willimantic office was alerted to the call to the abuse hotline, the husband, a registered sex offender and his wife, who was listed on the child-abuse registry, went to probate court to seek guardianship of the children. The couple lived in Plainfield.
The probate judge asked DCF to evaluate the family so the court could make an informed decision. But neither the complaint nor the evaluation would prompt the caseworkers to take corrective action and remove the children.
“There is a human-resources investigation under way,” Katz said. “People have been suspended, pending the conclusion of the investigation. There could be retraining ordered, all the way up to termination. This case was not handled appropriately.””
DCF Employees Suspended After Leaving Children With Registered Sex Offender
[Hartford Courant 2/25/16 by Josh Kovner]
Update 2: A search of the Connecticut court records shows that George and Nancie have a 6/15/16 court date where they are awaiting their plea.
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