How Could You? Hall of Shame-Robert Metzner

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.

A 2019 case came to light.

From Clearwater, Florida, foster father Robert Metzner, 69, “is facing charges for lewd and lascivious molestation and possession of child pornography after his arrest on Thursday, according to Pinellas Park Police.

Police found at least 160 images of child porn on a USB they say belongs to 69-year-old Robert Metzner. They also seized several other electronic devices from Metzner’s Clearwater home and will be analyzing them.

Metzner is also alleged to have inappropriately touched an 8-year-old boy in 2018. According to police, the boy said Metzner touched his genitals several times with a wash cloth when he was in the bath.

Police say Metzner was caring for the child through the Eckerd child foster care process. The child was in his care for one week, according to police.

The investigation is on-going. At this time, Metzner faces 12 counts of possession of child pornography and one count of lewd and lascivious molestation.”

Pinellas County man arrested for lewd and lascivious molestation, child pornography

[ABC WFTS  May 16, 2019]
“Another child was then placed in Metzner’s home in March. After another complaint surfaced, Eckerd Connects, the company responsible for child welfare in Pinellas County, removed that child after a few days.

Metzner’s home was closed in April when the paperwork was complete.

He was arrested on Thursday after detectives found a USB drive belonging to him containing child pornography.

We are told that the complaint in March was investigated, but they also did not find any evidence. We are told, however, that the case is not yet closed.

Eckerd Connects gave us this statement:

We do everything we can to assure the appropriateness of our caregivers and the safety of the children. We are deeply saddened by this revelation and will be evaluating our practices to determine if more can be done.”

Man accused of molesting foster child was investigated in 2nd incident

[WTSP 6/17/19 by Jennifer Titus]

“In 2019, Mandi Jo was worried about her oldest son, Danny.

Danny and his brothers had been bouncing around the foster care system since March, after a boyfriend slammed Mandi Jo’s face into a cabinet.

At school, teachers said the 6-year-old was eating glue sticks, tearing up homework and hitting people on a near-daily basis.

Then, Danny’s grandmother caught the boy in a shocking sexual act with his younger brother, sending the family into a tailspin of suspicion and accusations.

But Mandi Jo was missing a crucial piece of information, one that she wouldn’t learn from caseworkers or from police, but from a USA TODAY reporter in November 2019: One of Danny’s foster parents had been accused of molesting two young boys and was now charged with possessing child pornography.

The first molestation allegation had surfaced a year earlier, regarding an 8-year-old foster boy.

The second had been reported in April – regarding her son Danny.

It was a staggering revelation for Mandi Jo, who said she had asked caseworkers why Danny was suddenly removed from Robert Metzner’s foster home earlier that year.

“They just told me it turns out he wasn’t approved,” Mandi Jo said.

Danny’s story is a case study in how serious allegations against foster parents often go unchecked in Florida, where child welfare officials are pulling record-breaking numbers of kids into the system without enough safe places to put them.

The case shows how the Florida Department of Children and Families and one of its largest contractors, Eckerd Community Alternatives, cut corners in screening and investigating Metzner, then hid troubling discoveries from parents.

Metzner is charged with 18 counts of child pornography. Prosecutors declined to pursue molestation charges, citing lack of evidence.

Chris Card, the chief of community-based care for Eckerd, defended the agency’s decision to license Metzner in an email, stating that the 69-year-old “did not have any disqualifying or concerning issues identified in his background checks.”

Card also claimed that Eckerd workers “make sure that parents know of any issues or events that take place involving their child in foster care.”

But Mandi Jo, as well as Danny’s stepfather, aunt and three of Danny’s grandparents vehemently denied that any caseworkers or investigators notified them about Metzner’s alleged abuse of Danny, despite being in constant contact with them throughout 2019.

That is unacceptable, said Amelia Franck Meyer, a former foster care agency CEO in Minnesota and founder of the nonprofit Alia, which advocates for child welfare reform.

“Not only were they not told, they were lied to,” Franck Meyer said. “It’s systemically-induced trauma. It’s an epic, systemic failure.”

Patricia Morris felt something was off about Robert Metzner the first day she walked into his modest white home in Clearwater.

On paper, nothing stood out. After working nearly three decades as an electrical engineer for a machinery company outside Ann Arbor, the 69-year-old German citizen retired in 2012 and moved to Florida, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Morris was one of several nurses who rotated through Metzner’s house 24/7 to care for his adult son with severe disabilities, adopted decades ago while he lived in Michigan.

She and Rita Fleishauer, a certified nursing assistant who also worked in the home, said Metzner was cruel and verbally abusive, calling the staff names like “stupid f—ing idiot” over minor errors.”

The two also worried about Metzner’s attachment to young boys.

Fleishauer said Metzner was obsessed with television characters like Henry Danger, a 13-year-old superhero on Nickelodeon, and Jude Foster, a preteen boy on the ABC drama The Fosters who is both gay and adopted.

Three years earlier, Pinellas County Schools dropped Metzner as a volunteer “lunch mentor” for two disadvantaged middle school boys after reprimanding him for texting students and having “inappropriate” conversations with them about smoking pot, district records show.

And Morris felt strange seeing Metzner climb into bed with his adult son to cuddle him.

“You could see the look on the poor guy’s face,” Morris said, of the son. “His eyeballs would get like half-dollars when he did that.”

In August 2018, Morris said Metzner became enraged when she fumbled while operating a mechanical lift for his son. According to Morris, the nearly 6-foot-tall, 200-plus pound Metzner lunged at her, chasing her around the living room and cornering her against a wall until she ran out of the house.

A shaken Morris reported the incident to Pinellas Park police the next day. The nurse told police that Metzner was abusive “to all of his caretakers” and that he was getting “more aggressive in speech and demeanor.”

Four months later, Eckerd sent Metzner his first foster child, an 8-year-old boy.

The 8-year-old had been in foster care for nearly two years and lived in more than two dozen homes, according to placement data analyzed by USA TODAY. For one 11-day stretch in December 2018, the young boy spent every night in a different house.

This wasn’t unusual at Eckerd.

The Clearwater-based nonprofit receives more than $120 million per year to oversee foster care services in Tampa Bay. But years of rising removal rates starting in 2014 created an influx of foster children into the agency’s care. By late 2018, Eckerd was responsible for more than 2,250 foster children between Pasco and Pinellas counties, but had just 470 licensed foster homes.

In desperation, caseworkers across Tampa Bay resorted to bedding foster children down in offices, cars and night-to-night foster home placements.

In a statement, Card denied that the foster home shortage made licensing officials more lax about screening. He also noted there was “24/7 nursing care in (Metzner’s) home” and said one of the nurses had “completed a reference” for Metzner.

But Fleishauer, the main caretaker in the home, said she was not aware of Eckerd officials interviewing any of them.

“I was appalled by the way Eckerd did their background checks,” she said.

State law requires foster care officials to interview people who live in the home during the background check process. DCF also recommends that licensing officials take it a step further and talk to people who “regularly” spend time at the home.

“If there are nurses in the home constantly observing the care of another adopted child, I can’t imagine a better reference,” said Peter Digre, a former DCF deputy secretary. “That’s like the perfect reference.”

State regulations also require licensing officials to check local police reports on potential foster parents, even if the incident did not result in criminal charges. USA TODAY Network obtained Morris’ police report through a simple public records request.

Had Eckerd consulted her, Morris said, she would have “gladly” told them Metzner was unfit to be a foster parent.

“Nobody – not a soul – talked to me,” she said. “And you found me, so why couldn’t they?”

It didn’t take long for concerns to arise over the 8-year-old.

Fleishauer said Metzner paid little attention to the boy’s care, feeding him a steady diet of mozzarella sticks and candy.

It bothered the nursing assistant that Metzner often had the 8-year-old sit in his lap, and she grew suspicious that he was sleeping in the boy’s bed, which was in a converted sunroom.

A week into his stay, after school officials called law enforcement to hospitalize the boy for acting out at school, the child told his mother that Metzner had rubbed his penis in the bathtub, according to police and court records.

“He cleaned it for me … I kept saying stop, stop, stop, stop, but he didn’t,” the boy told his mother, according to a petition for a restraining order she filed against Metzner. “I finally screamed in his face YOU’RE HURTING ME!!!”

When confronted, Metzner told the woman he was concerned her son’s penis could become infected if not washed properly, according to court records. Metzner then insisted on meeting her and her son to drop off clothes and medication and became furious when she refused his offer to drive them home, speeding out of the parking lot so quickly his tires squealed, according to the petition.

“Robert sought out becoming a foster parent to prey on defenseless parentless children,” the mother wrote. “HE IS A PREDATOR.”

The boy repeated the story that day to investigators at the Pinellas County Sheriff’s Office, which conducts child abuse investigations on behalf of DCF. According to their records, the 8-year-old said Metzner touched him on two occasions, using soap and a rag.

But a week later, when interviewers tried to get the 8-year-old to recount what happened, he recanted, according to police records. Investigators declared “no credible evidence” to support the boy’s allegations and “no concerns” with Metzner, according to Eckerd officials.

The investigators did not interview the nurses, according to Fleishauer.

In skipping that step, child protection experts said, DCF neglected a critical part of its job.

It’s common for child sex abuse victims to recant, said Amy Russell, a child protection consultant and executive director of a children’s advocacy center in Washington. Victims might feel affection for their abuser or shame about what happened. They may also fear being thrust into an even worse home.

“In general, recantations should be investigated as deeply as the initial allegation,” Russell said. “People think kids are supposed to immediately jump up and say ‘This is happening to me’ and be able to articulate it in a way that’s detailed enough and sounds credible enough that people believe them. But kids don’t tell like that.”

Victor Vieth, a prominent child protection trainer and the director of research at the Zero Abuse Project, said investigators should have talked to everybody who was going in and out of the home to see if they could corroborate details in the boy’s story.

“There’s an open question of whether they knew that these nurses were in the house,” Vieth said. “But if they did, then they should be talking to them.”

In addition, bathing and sleeping in the same bed are common grooming techniques, according to experts.

“There’s red flags flying all over the place,” Russell said.

DCF’s own operating procedure directs child protective investigators to interview a wide range of so-called collateral contacts during the course of their investigation. Supervisors are supposed to double check that investigators have been thorough.

But Florida’s child protective investigators have struggled to keep up with large caseloads and inadequate training.

In May 2019, after the USA TODAY Network reported on a foster father accused of molesting three toddlers, DCF and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement assembled a task force to examine their handling of child sex abuse cases.

The task force found that child protective investigators across Florida are overworked, undertrained and sloppy about documenting evidence. Supervisors, who are supposed to sign off on each case, often rubber-stamp cases without assessing their thoroughness, the task force found.

USA TODAY’s wider investigation also found that child welfare officials frequently allow foster parents to keep their licenses despite repeated accusations of abuse or neglect or clear licensing violations, such as use of corporal punishment or sleeping in the same bed as the foster children.

Eckerd decided to take another chance on Metzner.

Shortly after DCF’s investigators closed the case, Fleishauer said she overheard Eckerd employees on the phone, reminding the foster father that it was inappropriate to sleep in the same bed as a foster child and asking him to take more training to refresh him on boundaries.

Card denied this, stating in an email that Eckerd was not aware of any concerns about Metzner and the boy sleeping in the same bed.

Three months later, Eckerd sent Danny.

By then, the situation at the agency was worse.

In February 2019, Eckerd told state officials that three previous infusions of emergency funding hadn’t been enough to stabilize the agency, which was still projecting a $4.2 million shortfall and surging numbers of foster kids.

National standards set by the Child Welfare League of America call for a maximum of 12 cases per child abuse investigator and 17 families per caseworker.

At Eckerd, more than half of child protective investigators in the circuit were juggling 12 or more investigations at a time, according to DCF data. Meanwhile, the average Eckerd caseworker was responsible for 23 children at any given time.

The overcrowding was taking its toll, with annual turnover among case managers nearing 100%, according to risk pool reports.

It’s a cycle that Franck Meyer, the founder of Alia, said she’s seen play out across the country.

“It’s a compounding effect,” she said. “When you’re that stretched and people leave, who takes the cases? The people who are left, who are exhausted. It’s a really challenging situation to get out of.”

Franck Meyer said child welfare agencies have historically focused on taking kids from their families rather than investing in preventive services to help parents. In Florida and nationwide, the vast majority of kids end up in foster care not because of abuse but because of neglect due to substance abuse and mental health issues.

Mandi Jo knew nothing of Eckerd’s turmoil. But the 34-year-old said her caseworkers seemed distracted and were unsupportive.

At first, they praised Mandi Jo for sharing custody with her ex. Then, they argued she put her kids in danger by moving in with him, resulting in the boys being sent to foster care. Then, Mandi Jo said it took caseworkers weeks or months to sign off on her required domestic violence counseling and parenting classes.

Eckerd also moved her sons so often that she couldn’t keep up. Like the first foster child, Danny was often moved to a different foster home from one day to the next. In a month and a half, he changed homes 13 times, placement records show.

Mandi Jo hoped things would be different at Metzner’s home, where Danny landed in March 2019.

The foster father doted on the 6-year-old, lavishing him with new clothes, drones, tablets and scooters, family said. But “the more he talked, the more it seemed to me that he was obsessed with Daniel,” said Danny’s grandmother.

Over Facebook, Metzner wrote the family lengthy messages, sending them photos of the boy sitting on his lap and giving unsolicited advice about the family dynamics.

“Eckerd thinks it’s best for the two boys to be together,” Metzner wrote in one message shared with the USA TODAY Network by the family. “I don’t. … Brotherhood is overrated. I haven’t talked to my brother in 2 years.”

Suddenly, less than two weeks into his stay, Mandi Jo said her caseworker told her Danny was being moved again because of a “paperwork” issue.

What the caseworker didn’t say was that there had been a second report.

The alleged victim was Danny.

The reporter was Fleishauer, the nursing assistant.

The first week, she watched with growing alarm as Metzner drove around in his Mercedes-Benz with the boy on his lap and went camping with him in the backyard in a two-person tent.

The second week, Metzner took Danny to the beach, where they stayed overnight at a hotel, according to Fleishauer. The next day, the foster father told her the boy had been shy about taking a shower and tried to cover his privates, calling it “cute,” she said.

Fleishauer wrestled with whether to lodge a report.

The nursing assistant was concerned that investigators dismissed the first child’s allegations as implausible. And it disturbed her that Eckerd had treated Metzner allegedly sleeping in the boy’s bed so casually.

Fleischauer also worried that if she made a report but wasn’t believed, she could lose her job – and the ability to keep an eye on the boy and Metzner’s nonverbal son.

Then, on April 1, after an argument with Metzner, one of the aides vented in a text to Fleishauer that he had seen the foster father molesting not just Danny but also the previous foster boy.

Fleishauer called the hotline.

This time, investigators talked to the caretakers, she said. But once again, both police and DCF’s child abuse investigators concluded there was no evidence to support the accusations.

Days later, Metzner fired Fleishauer.

Child abuse investigators are required by law to interview parents of alleged victims when investigating foster parents. But Mandi Jo, living 20 miles away in Palm Harbor, said she was never contacted.

Even if it were not a legal requirement, Russell, the Washington child protection expert, said parents have a right to know about alleged abuse involving their children.

Sex abuse can affect a child’s mental health, physical health, relationships, education and career outcomes for years to come if they are not believed and given appropriate support, Russell said. Their behavior can be interpreted as aggressive or manipulative when they are actually acting out trauma responses.

Child sex abuse victims are also at greater risk of being revictimized, and less likely to report future abuse.

Vieth pointed out that youth organizations like the Boy Scouts and USA Swimming have cracked down on sexual misconduct in recent years, becoming far more likely to cut off a coach or leader once accused.

“A child in foster care is about as high a risk to be abused as any child in the nation,” Vieth said. “So it raises a good question: How many chances do you want to take with children in foster care? I would argue that you want to take as little chance as possible.”

Richard Wexler, executive director of the National Coalition for Child Protection Reform, questioned whether DCF and its contracted lead agencies can objectively investigate abuse allegations against the very foster parents they approved, especially given the severe foster home shortage in Florida.

“The agency’s failure set off this whole cascade of cruelty and pain,” said Wexler. “Clearly, they were vastly more interested in protecting themselves than protecting this child.”

In the 2000s, foster care officials were required to report every allegation of foster parent abuse to regional volunteer-led watchdog groups called Local Advocacy Councils.

The councils were empowered by the Legislature to advocate on behalf of vulnerable Floridians receiving state services, like children in foster homes or disabled people in adult day cares. The councils conducted hundreds of site visits and investigations per year, at one point even suing DCF for access to foster care records that it said the agency was withholding.

But the Legislature defunded the system in 2009 amid the Great Recession, saving $500,000.

Metzner’s story might have ended there.

But a week after she was fired, Fleishauer found a black thumb drive in her purse. She used them often at Metzner’s house while doing schoolwork, and she had spotted this one on the floor and scooped it into her bag, she said.

When the nurse plugged it into her computer, her stomach turned at the images that flashed before her eyes.

A forensic analysis of the thumb drive later confirmed 160 images of child pornography. A search warrant on Metzner’s home turned up a dozen more on a Toshiba hard drive with boys ranging in age from 12 to 14 engaging in sex acts with adults, sometimes appearing “in distress,” according to police affidavits.

Eckerd had made Metzner’s home “inactive” after the second abuse allegation. Now, they asked him to surrender his license.

None of the pornographic images featured boys in Metzner’s care. But Pinellas Park police investigated the foster father for a third time, according to a press release.

This time, Metzner’s statements corroborated the first foster boy’s allegations, police said. According to the arrest affidavit, a nursing assistant in the home also overheard the first foster child saying “no, no,” while in the bathroom with Metzner.

Metzner was arrested in May 2019.

But the news didn’t reach Mandi Jo, who was still struggling to finish her case plan with Eckerd and address Danny’s sexual behavior with his younger brother.

At an interview at her mother’s house in Palm Harbor, surrounded by boxes of paperwork and walls of old family photos, Mandi Jo buried her face in her hands as a reporter shared details of the allegations against Metzner. She then excused herself to cry in the backyard.

Her mother, Frani, fought back her own tears.

“I just cannot understand and believe that they did that,” the grandmother said. “DCF is the one who abused them.”

The family, which disputes whether the boys should have been taken from Mandi Jo in the first place, is now considering its legal options against Eckerd.

Meanwhile, Eckerd has continued to struggle. In September 2019, the agency parted ways with one of its subcontractors, a nonprofit called Directions for Living, for poor performance in managing cases. The nonprofit, which was involved in Mandi Jo’s case, criticized Eckerd for making caseworkers undertake double or triple the number of appropriate cases.

“Despite repeated requests for more funding, oversight, advocacy and support, the child welfare system remains in crisis,” CEO April Lott told reporters.

Six months later, DCF worked with lawmakers to introduce an “accountability” bill that singled out Eckerd for substandard performance, including rising rates of abuse in foster care. Lawmakers voted to give the agency two years to show improvement, setting aside $8.3 million to fund the program.

Meanwhile, Metzner has been out on bond for more than a year.

Prosecutors, citing a lack of evidence, dropped the molestation charges against the former foster father, leaving only the 18 counts of child pornography. If Metzner is convicted, he faces a potential sentence of 15 years for each image and possible deportation.

Metzner’s trial has been delayed because of COVID-19. His lawyer, David Parry, declined to comment on behalf of Metzner.

Fleishauer makes it a point to attend the pre-trial hearings whenever she can.

“Bob never should have gotten a kid,” she said. “And he never, ever should have gotten a second one.””

A foster father was accused of sex abuse. Then he got a second chance.

[USA Today 10/15/2020 by Daphne Chen]

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